Anne Enright

“There's no such thing as a life that is not normal, or, there's no such thing as a life that is not abnormal. We all have amazing lives; we all have very dull lives.”

“Ireland is a series of stories that have been told to us, starting with the Irish Celtic national revival. I never believed in 'Old Ireland.' It has been made all of kitsch by the diaspora, looking back and deciding what Ireland is. Yes, it is green. Yes, it is friendly. I can't think of anything else for definite.”

“If you grow up in Ireland and read books then you really are obliged to attempt your own some time. It is not exactly a choice. I still don't know if I am a writer. Believe me, there are days when I have my doubts.”

“I am interested in levels of brain discourse. How articulate are the voices in your head? You know, there's a different voice for the phone, and a different voice if you're talking in bed. When you're starting off with a narrator, it's interesting to think, where is their voice coming from, what part of their brain?”

“He's fine. He's fine,' he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.'Why should he be unhappy?' she wanted to say. 'He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?”

“Here we go again. Always a few drinks, but sometimes even sober, we play the unhappiness game; endlessly round and round. Ding dong. Tighter and tighter. On and on. Push me pull you. Come here and i'll tell you how much i hate you. Hang on a minute while i leave you. All the while we know we are missing the point, whatever the point used to be.”

“For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.”

“When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.”

“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.”

“I was raised in a very old fashioned Ireland where women were reared to be lovely.”

“You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.”

“I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.”

“I am a trembling mess from hip to knee. There is a terrible heat, a looseness in my innards that makes me want to dig my fists between my thighs. It is a confusing feeling - somewhere between diarrhoea and sex - this grief that is almost genital.”

“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 very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.”

“To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.”

“Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.”

“If you can just actually let the character be for a bit, then you get the right sense.”