There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.

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

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.

Having kids is very difficult to do on your own, and it's really crazy difficult to think you're doing it as a team and to find out that you're not actually part of a team.

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.

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. The Gathering did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.