I'm not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature.
As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached 'The Aeneid' just as I would a contemporary poem or novel - and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.
Though I have no real understanding of the mechanics of football, and can only nod along helplessly at complex post-match analyses, I do enjoy watching people who are enormously good at something doing that thing very well.
When I was in Trinity, at least for the first couple of years, I didn't really interact with anyone who wasn't in Trinity. A lot of the years, I lived on campus.
When I'm writing something, everything falls into place. When I'm not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there's nowhere to put it all.
A lot of the time, I read something I've written, and I think, 'Well, that's competent. It's not exactly breaking any boundaries. It's not exactly transgressive. It's just a bunch of fake people in a room talking to each other. But maybe there's a value to that.'
I'm not writing to encourage people to read my book or even books in general. That's not my job. My job is to write them. And if people want to read them, that's great.
Everyone has a life. I haven't had a particularly interesting one.
I gave myself the small task of writing honestly about the kind of life I knew. I believe there is some value in carrying out that task, however limited.
One thing debating did was bring me in contact with a whole social world that I had never experienced before. It's sort of a very international, very niche hobby.
There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.
When I read interviews with people like Kevin Barry or Colin Barrett, who I hugely admire, they don't really seem to come up against the question of likeability even though their characters, in some instances, are really horrible.
I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.
I'm interested in how we can put political principles into practice in our personal lives and the limits of theory when it comes to our desires and needs.
It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. 'La La Land' was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.
Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.
I started writing 'Normal People' not knowing that anyone would read it, not knowing that anyone would read the first book, so I didn't really have any hang ups about, 'Oh, I can't do this again. I've done this already.' It was just a project I was working on for my own amusement.
I think it's best for me to kind of just plough on doing whatever interests me, just following my own whims, because otherwise, I would think, 'Oh well, I have to write something now that really represents my generation or that really represents young Irish people.'
I thought school was immensely boring, and as a teenager, I often found social life quite mystifying... I was not someone to whom it came easily to be charming.
I feel like I could devote myself to far more important things than writing novels.
