Colm Tóibín

"The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope…"

"The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel…"

"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, that reminds me daily of my failure."

"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 you're modest, and it's the 1950s – so you've never seen it in a film?' I listened c…"

"Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them . . . a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite w…"

"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."

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