Sally Rooney

In everything I do, my principal inspiration is the 1996 Belle & Sebastian album 'If You're Feeling Sinister.'

I like Christianity. I'm a fan of Jesus and his whole philosophy but not the social teaching aspects of it, of course.

I'm only interested in writing about relationships.

We're not always the most insightful about ourselves.

In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.

Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don't really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it's better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.

I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.

Being shortlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is, of course, a real honour for me and my work. When I wrote 'Conversations with Friends,' it was hard for me to imagine the book even finding readers - so it's a huge privilege to find it judged alongside such exciting and innovative new writing. I'm very grateful.

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.

I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.

I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people's relationships and interactions. I don't want language to get in the way of that. It's quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.

I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.

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.

It really felt like my generation was deprived of a future that we believed was ours. I don't mean some hugely privileged future where we all have gigantic houses. I mean having a job.

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.

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.

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.

I was on the Internet a lot during my teenage years, and I think the influence of that kind of textuality on my writing has been pretty significant.

Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.

I think the debating thing actually helped to establish to me that being popular was completely worthless. I didn't enjoy the social dynamic and immediately left after becoming number one. But it felt like I needed to do it to know what it was like. It wasn't just that I was an aggressive person, although that probably is true to an extent.

I am not trying to speak for anyone else, never mind an entire generation. I don't even know what that means.

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 try not to let myself get too wrapped up in the image of whatever my books have become in the outside world.

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.'

My friendships all tend to be quite steady, so it's really hard to novelise that stuff because it's just boring. I mean, there's interesting conversations, but there's no power struggle. And you can't work with equilibrium; you have to work with something that's just off and then observe how it tries to correct itself.

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.

To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.

I feel like I could devote myself to far more important things than writing novels.

There are a lot of people who probably enjoyed 'Conversations with Friends' who are part of the system that is actively exploiting other people's labour. I am sure there are landlords who read it and thought it was a great read. Am I happy that I have given those people 10 hours of distraction? Not really!

I couldn't quite get the hang of how to socialise as a teenager. I didn't really understand it.

You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.

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.'

As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.

A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.

Dialogue is the most fun to write. It's kind of like a tennis match.

If you look at the history of the letter in the novel, small changes in the British postal service became really significant because of how quickly people are suddenly able to communicate, and letters actually arrive at the intended time, and they arrive to the correct recipient. All of this is really important to a plot.

What I really like about Woody Allen's films is that there's a real investment in personal relationships. There is the idea that this is a serious concern worth making serious art about - how we love other people and how we can negotiate our relationships with them.

Everyone has a life. I haven't had a particularly interesting one.

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.

I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.

I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.

I can't help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings.

You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.

I'm not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature.

I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.

I hate Yeats! A lot of his poems are not very good, but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini. He was really into fascism. He believed deeply in the idea of a 'noble class' who are superior by birth to the plebs.

What does it mean to have a healthy relationship? It's such a strangely clinical way of talking about interpersonal dynamics, like you can do a white blood cell count and say, 'No, it's not looking good for that one.' It's impossible to have a loving relationship in which you never cause pain and no pain ever is caused to you.

I'm very introverted. Easily a few days could go by where I would not really leave the house or talk to anybody other than my partner.