If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.

If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. Its the people who are always on the brink of crisis who dont hit bottom who are in trouble.

Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.

There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.

I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.

I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.