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.

The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

My kids are supposed to live till they are one hundred. You don't have to have a perfect house or a perfect relationship with your child or a perfect child, and you yourself do not have to be perfect.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

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

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

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.