Ireland Is Such A Young Society. The

If You're Writing A Scene For A Character With Whom You Disagree In Every Way, You Still Need To Show How That Character Is Absolutely Justified In His Or Her Own Mind, Or The Scene Will Come Across As Being About The Author's Views Rather Than About The Character's.

We Think Of Mortality So Little These Days... I Thought Of The Stern Victorian Determination To Keep Death In Mind, The Uncompromising Tombstones. Remember, Pilgrim, As You Pass By, As You Are Now So Once Was I: As I Am So Will You Be.

Don't Get Discouraged If You're Hammering Away At A Sentence Or A Paragraph Or A Chapter, And It Keeps Coming Out Wrong. You're Allowed To Get It Wrong, As Many Times As You Need To; You Only Need To Get It Right Once.

Real Isn't What They Try To Tell You. Time Isn't. Grown-ups Hammer Down All These Markers, Bells, Schedules, Coffee-breaks, To Stake Down Time So You'll Start Believing It's Something Small And Mean, Something That Scrapes Flake After Flake Off Of Everything You Love Till There's Nothing Left; To Stake You Down So You Don't Lift Off And Fly Away, Somersaulting Through Whirlpools Of Months, Skimming Through Eddies Of Glittering Seconds, Pouring Handfuls Of Hours Over Your Upturned Face.

I Thought I Could Never Write A Proper Book; I'd Never Done It Before. But I Thought I Could Write A Sequence. Then I Had A Chapter. The Next Thing I Knew I Was Turning Acting Down.