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

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.

I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.