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.

And, in fact, this is the tale that I would love to write: history is such a romantic place, with its jarveys and urchins and side-buttoned boots. If it would just stay still, I think, and settle down. If it would just stop sliding around in my head.

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

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

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.

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.

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.