We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places.

Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

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.

Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space.

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

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