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 belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

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 read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

I'd much prefer to write more quickly.

As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn't write. It's a process of discovery.