I Work At The Sentences.

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.

If Your Life Just Falls Apart Early On, You Can Put It Together Again. Its The People Who Are Always On The Brink Of Crisis Who Dont Hit Bottom Who Are In Trouble.

There Are So Few People Given Us To Love. I Want To Tell My Daughters This, That Each Time You Fall In Love It Is Important, Even At Nineteen. Especially At Nineteen. And If You Can, At Nineteen, Count The People You Love On One Hand, You Will Not, At Forty, Have Run Out Of Fingers On The Other. There Are So Few People Given Us To Love And They All Stick.

Write Whatever Way You Like. Fiction Is Made Of Words On A Page; Reality Is Made Of Something Else. It Doesn't Matter How "real" Your Story Is, Or How "made Up": What Matters Is Its Necessity.

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.