The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.

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'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

Try to be accurate about stuff.

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.