Joseph O'Neill

“There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.”

“No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory—a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.”

“I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate.”

“If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.”