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 was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
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.
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.
I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
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.
I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
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 write anywhere - when I have an idea, it's hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn't be disturbed; it really filled my day.
I'm really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don't confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.
I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
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.
