"A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country."

"If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away."

"I was brought up in a house where there was a great deal of silence."

"I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, …"

"The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about m…"

"I was the worst barman who ever lived. My pints of Guinness were unholy."

"I have a rule that I don't drink in New York because I don't want to wake up with a hangover and not be able to work."

"When I was a professor at the University of Austin in Texas, it had such a luxurious swimming–pool that one end had a…"

"I went to a friend who's a girl and asked her, 'What's it like to have sex for the first time, if you're Irish – so y…"

"Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them . . . a sexual allure which…"