I Read All The Time. I Was

Among Its Many Other Obligations, Fiction Always Has To Be Believable. Life Does Not Have To Suffer Such Constraint, And Much Of What Takes Place Is Believable Only Because It Happens.

The Way I See It Is That All The Ol' Guff About Being Irish Is A Kind Of Nonsense. I Mean, I Couldn't Be Anything Else No Matter What I Tried To Be. I Couldn't Be Chinese Or Japanese.

When I Start To Write, Words Have Become Physical Presence. It Was To See If I Could Bring That Private World To Life That Found Its First Expression Through Reading. I Really Dislike The Romantic Notion Of The Artist.

Everything That We Inherit, The Rain, The Skies, The Speech, And Anybody Who Works In The English Language In Ireland Knows That There's The Dead Ghost Of Gaelic In The Language We Use And Listen To And That Those Things Will Reflect Our Irish Identity.

Ireland Is A Peculiar Society In The Sense That It Was A Nineteenth Century Society Up To About 1970 And Then It Almost Bypassed The Twentieth Century.