Anything That Is Given Can Be At

I Belong To The Middle Class That Grew Up Very Influenced By The Catholic Church. The People Of The Novel Are From A More Pagan And Practical World In Which The Christianity Is Just A Veneer.

Ireland Is A Peculiar Society In The Sense That It Was A Nineteenth Century Society Up To About 1970 And Then It Almost Bypassed The Twentieth Century.

When I Start To Write, Words Have Become Physical Presence. It Was To See If I Could Bring That Private World To Life That Found Its First Expression Through Reading. I Really Dislike The Romantic Notion Of The Artist.

We Absolutely Believed In Heaven And Hell, Purgatory, And Even Limbo. I Mean, They Were Actually Closer To Us Than Australia Or Canada, That They Were Real Places.

Anything That Is Given Can Be At Once Taken Away. We Have To Learn Never To Expect Anything, And When It Comes It's No More Than A Gift On Loan.