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

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 wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

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.

I said that when I looked at photographs of the firefighters who went into the Twin Towers, their faces looked to me like Irish faces. I hadn't yet learnt how careful outsiders have to be when talking about race in America, and I'd put my foot in it. Someone stood up and said aggressively, 'What do you mean by Irish faces?'

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

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.