I can't think of anything you might say about Irish people that is absolutely true.

It is very hard to trace the effect of words on a life.

I'm really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don't confuse the issues, really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

In more static societies, like Ireland, you can tell where a person is from by their surname, or where their grandparents are from.

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.