I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.
Writing about carrying the past on your back is a manifestation of my Irishness, because we go on and on and will for another two or three generations.
Irish poetry has lost the ready ear and the comforts of recognition. But we must go on. We must be true to our own minds.
The problem with being Irish... is having 'Riverdance' on your back. It's a burden at times.
We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.
Being Irish, I always had this love of words.
My soul is still Irish.
I don't feel I have to defend myself for being English or for being Irish, because, in a way, I don't feel either. And, in another way, of course, I'm both.
I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
Show me an Irishman who can't tell a story - I don't think they exist.