Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

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

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you're writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, 'Your time is up.'

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.