Try to be accurate about stuff.

When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.

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.

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

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.

Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

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.