For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

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

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.

And what amazes me as I hit the motorway is not the fact that everyone loses someone, but that everyone loves someone. It seems like such a massive waste of energy -- and we all do it, all the people beetling along between the white lines, merging, converging, overtaking. We each love someone, even though they will die. And we keep loving them, even when they are not there to love any more. And there is no logic or use to any of this, that I can see.

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 can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.