The Booker Prize Is A Big, Popular

All A Work Of Art Can Do Is Present The Surface. I Can't Know The Insides Of People. I Know Very Little About The Inside Of Myself.

I Have Never Really Got Used To Being On This Earth. Sometimes I Think Our Presence Here Is Due To A Cosmic Blunder, That We Were Meant For Another Planet Altogether, With Other Arrangements, And Other Laws, And Other, Grimmer Skies. I Try To Imagine It, Our True Place, Off On The Far Side Of The Galaxy, Whirling And Whirling. And The Ones Who Were Meant For Here, Are They Out There, Baffled And Homesick, Like Us? No, They Would Have Become Extinct Long Ago. How Could They Survive, These Gentle Earthlings, In A World That Was Made To Contain Us.

I Have This Fantasy. I'm Walking Past A Bookshop And I Click My Fingers And All My Books Go Blank. So I Can Start Again And Get It Right.

In Order Really To Write One Has To Sink Deep Into The Self And Become Lost There.

I Live In Dublin, God Knows Why. There Are Greatly More Congenial Places I Could Have Settled In - Italy, France, Manhattan - But I Like The Climate Here, And Irish Light Seems To Be Essential For Me And For My Writing.