For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

Movie people are possessed by demons, but a very low form of demons.

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.