I love the characters not knowing everything and the reader knowing more than them. There's more mischief in that and more room for seriousness, too.
From Anne Enright
I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.
I never wanted to be mainstream as a writer, but look at what's happened.
I became a full-time writer in 1993 and have been very happy, insofar as anybody is, since.
If your life just falls apart early on, you can put it together again. It's the people who are always on the brink of crisis who don't hit bottom who are in trouble.
I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.
When I'm working, I'm not so much disciplined as obsessive. I have this feeling that I need to clear everything away and get this down.
For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.
There often is a dark secret in books... There is often a gathering sense of dread; there's a gap sometimes in the text from which all kinds of monsters can emerge.
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