I don't own a Kindle, no. I love books, they are beautiful objects.

I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

I'm a hopeless 19th-century romantic.