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 never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.

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.

People do not change, they are merely revealed.

Sometimes I will spend two or three days not speaking to anyone outside of the immediate family when they come home, and then I find that I've been emailing like fury. Once you give in to that silence, it's quite nice.

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

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.