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.

People think motherhood involves a lot of domestic labor, and it doesn't. It involves being nice to your children as often as possible. That's part of my trick. I don't have that anxiety about meeting their needs.

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.

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.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.