Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

I am a storyteller and experience the bliss of writing.

I'd say any good set or any comedy that I've worked on, that's worked, has been comedians pitching ideas back and forth to each other. A lot of like, 'What if you say this? What about this?'

I think we're in a quiet time right now. luxury can be in the fit.

The [Democratic] party's become an urban party, and they don't get rural America. They don't get agriculture.

The moral of filmmaking in Britain is that you will be screwed by the weather.

It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time.

It's not always so great to be objectified, but I don't feel I have much of a choice right now. I'm young in my career. I know I have to strike when the iron is hot.

If you put everything together as far as my mind, my body, my game. If you put everything in one bottle, this is probably the best I've been.

Jealousy dislikes the world to know it.

I don't believe in writing people off.