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.

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

Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage.

in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat

John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

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.

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.