Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.

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.

Remember, if you sit at your desk for 15 or 20 years, every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does. It may not improve your temper, but it fixes something else. It makes you more free.

I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.

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

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.