I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

I think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

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

A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.

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

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

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