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

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

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

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

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

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.

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.