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

I'd much prefer to write more quickly.

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

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

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.

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

I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story.