I'd Much Prefer To Write More Quickly.

The Way I See It Is That All The Ol' Guff About Being Irish Is A Kind Of Nonsense. I Mean, I Couldn't Be Anything Else No Matter What I Tried To Be. I Couldn't Be Chinese Or Japanese.

Yes, But Also One Of The Problems For A Novelist In Ireland Is The Fact That There Are No Formal Manners. I Mean Some People Have Beautiful Manners But There's No Kind Of Agreed Form Of Manners.

When You're In Danger Of Losing A Thing It Becomes Precious And When It's Around Us, It's In Tedious Abundance And We Take It For Granted As If We're Going To Live Forever, Which We're Not.

I Think Technique Can Be Taught But I Think The Only Way To Learn To Write Is To Read, And I See Writing And Reading As Completely Related. One Almost Couldn't Exist Without The Other.

The Imagination Demands That Life Be Told Slant Because Of Its Need Of Distance.