I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.