Sally Rooney

“We're not always the most insightful about ourselves.”

“Dialogue is the most fun to write. It's kind of like a tennis match.”

“When I was in Trinity, at least for the first couple of years, I didn't really interact with anyone who wasn't in Trinity. A lot of the years, I lived on campus.”

“You can love more than one person, she said. That's arguable. Why is it any different from having more than one friend? You're friends with me and you also have other friends, does that mean you don't really value me? I don't have other friends, I said.”

“I would rather do two things really, really, really well than do 16 things and have 14 of them fail.”

“I couldn't quite get the hang of how to socialise as a teenager. I didn't really understand it.”

“The window in which it's acceptable to listen to Ella Fitzgerald's 1960 record 'Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas' is short, so I keep it in heavy rotation throughout the festive season.”

“I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people's relationships and interactions. I don't want language to get in the way of that. It's quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.”

“You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.”

“In everything I do, my principal inspiration is the 1996 Belle & Sebastian album 'If You're Feeling Sinister.'”

“Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there's a connection between you and the narrator.”

“I think the debating thing actually helped to establish to me that being popular was completely worthless. I didn't enjoy the social dynamic and immediately left after becoming number one. But it felt like I needed to do it to know what it was like. It wasn't just that I was an aggressive person, although that probably is true to an extent.”

“I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.”

“Maybe niceness is the wrong metric, I said. Of course it's really about power, Bobbi agreed. But it's harder to work out who has the power, so instead we rely on 'niceness' as a kind of stand-in. I mean this is an issue in public discourse. We end up asking like, is Israel 'nicer' than Palestine.”

“It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. 'La La Land' was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.”

“I feel like I could devote myself to far more important things than writing novels.”

“I can't help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings.”

“I think it's best for me to kind of just plough on doing whatever interests me, just following my own whims, because otherwise, I would think, 'Oh well, I have to write something now that really represents my generation or that really represents young Irish people.'”

“It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.”

“Though I have no real understanding of the mechanics of football, and can only nod along helplessly at complex post-match analyses, I do enjoy watching people who are enormously good at something doing that thing very well.”