Anne Enright

“I do wish I could write like some of the American women, who can be clever and heartfelt and hopeful; people like Lorrie Moore and Jennifer Egan. But Ireland messed me up too much, I think, so I can't.”

“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.”

“Naming is nice. It took me days before I was able to speak a name for my first child (what if people did not like it?), and I suspect we gave her a secret, second name as well, to keep her safe.”

“I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.”

“I'm quite interested in the absolute roots of narrative, why we tell stories at all: where the monsters come from.”

“I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.”

“I think it's very important to write a demythologized woman character. My characters are flawed. They are no better than they should be.”

“If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.”

“Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.”

“The writing day can be, in some ways, too short, but it's actually a long series of hours, for months at a time, and there is a stillness there.”

“I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.”

“There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.”

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

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

“Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.”

“There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.”

“I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.”

“I write anywhere - when I have an idea, it's hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn't be disturbed; it really filled my day.”

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

“I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.”