"Oh it's terrifying, yeah: you come up to publication day and you suddenly realise 'right that's it, it's out in the world'. I remember when my publishers were telling me that it was starting to get on the bestseller list, and I was thinking 'Okay, well I've got a lot of family and a lot of friends, so okay that accounts for the first week'. And then I started realising that absolute strangers were gonna be reading it and...yeah it is quite terrifying actually."

“It's typically Jamesian because in a way its an unambiguous story: you know exactly what's going on, but it creates these ambiguities of feeling in you, because you want her protected, yet you can't like the father who's protecting her...”

“He taught me everything. He just used to say, and I'll never forget that, he said 'it's not big words and adjectives — that's boring'. And I thought 'ah yes' . . . I learned from that. Simplicity is the art of writing.”

“I'm always happy because your definition of 'young" is elastic...”

“I have a new scarlet coat and I look like a fire engine and I don't give a damn...”

“It's not a world that I know but I came to know something about it though the book which was good, but I see...when I look at literature, when I look at books I look at the structure of them and ... I saw a fairy tale actually, when I think about it you know the traditional princess who becomes a maid who rises to become a queen and all these mad people inbetween on that journey...”

“The way Doyle paints it is that the brotherhood, the Sinn Féin became the home for all these poor — you know, the woebegotten souls who were like trying to find their way.”