I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody.

I think my mother was very spiritual.

I mean I think that's a fact and I think that we had a very peculiar type of Catholic Church here in that it was a fortress Church.