If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.

Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.

Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.

Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.

There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.

There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.

There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.

I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.

I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.

I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.

I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.

If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.