Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am interested in silences
Try to be accurate about stuff.
Writing is not my problem, it is my solution.
People do not change, they are merely revealed.
I have no place left to live but in my own heart.
One of the reasons I write is I like being surprised
A novel is written not to be judged, but experienced.
Only bad writers think that their work is really good.
It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.
Resistless change, when powerless to improve, Can only mar.
Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.
I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking.
We do not always like the people we love- we do not always have that choice.
The truth. The dead want nothing else. It is the only thing that they require.
I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead
There is nothing as tentative as an old woman's touch; as loving or as horrible.
God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.
I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.
I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.
To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.
If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.
I think young children in the Western middle classes are objects of incredible anxiety.
Belief needs something terrible to make it work, I find--blood, nails, a bit of anguish.
I think writers worry that you might not exist in some strange way if you're not writing.
Cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat.
I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.
I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.
I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.
The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.
I do not believe in evil- I believe that we are human and fallible, that we things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.
I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.
There are about as many ways to be dead as there are to be alive. People linger in different ways, both publicly and privately.
There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.
In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.
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 think it’s very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.
The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.
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.
We have lost the art of public tenderness, these small gestures of wiping and washing; we have forgotten how abjectly the body welcomes a formal touch.
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 have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.
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 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'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.