Sally Rooney

“When I'm writing something, everything falls into place. When I'm not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there's nowhere to put it all.”

“As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached 'The Aeneid' just as I would a contemporary poem or novel - and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.”

“My friendships all tend to be quite steady, so it's really hard to novelise that stuff because it's just boring. I mean, there's interesting conversations, but there's no power struggle. And you can't work with equilibrium; you have to work with something that's just off and then observe how it tries to correct itself.”

“I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.”

“For me, watching Mohamed Salah play football is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small.”

“What does it mean to have a healthy relationship? It's such a strangely clinical way of talking about interpersonal dynamics, like you can do a white blood cell count and say, 'No, it's not looking good for that one.' It's impossible to have a loving relationship in which you never cause pain and no pain ever is caused to you.”

“I'm not writing to encourage people to read my book or even books in general. That's not my job. My job is to write them. And if people want to read them, that's great.”

“It really felt like my generation was deprived of a future that we believed was ours. I don't mean some hugely privileged future where we all have gigantic houses. I mean having a job.”

“I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.”

“I was on the Internet a lot during my teenage years, and I think the influence of that kind of textuality on my writing has been pretty significant.”

“I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.”

“I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.”

“Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don't really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it's better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.”

“I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.”

“In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.”

“I don't think of myself as busy because I don't even have to get dressed most days.”

“I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.”

“I think I only appear smart by staying quiet as often as possible.”

“As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.”

“Everyone has a life. I haven't had a particularly interesting one.”