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

The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.

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

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.