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.

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.

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

Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.

There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

People do not change, they are merely revealed.