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

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.

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.

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

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