There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

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.

We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.

There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.

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

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.