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.
If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all where the monsters come from.
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
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 work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
