COLM TOIBIN

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland.

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.

The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.

Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

You have to keep writing. It's almost like practice, almost like tennis, that actually after a few days of not writing, first of all it makes you slightly depressed and uneasy, but it also affects the style when you start up again. You need to get the show on the road.

I think the whole business of people emigrating was that no one ever told them, although everyone knew, especially if it was to the United States, that it was forever, and the party before you left was called an 'American wake,' in the sense that they knew you wouldn't come back.

The best thing about New York is working late into the night. At 1 in the morning on a Saturday, to be still working, there's an immense satisfaction in being enclosed by it.

I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical.

I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult, and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway, and I would disapprove of it.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side.

It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.

People's interest in glamour and clothes and nylon stockings and all those things were, when I was a little boy, the sort of world that I listened to.

I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.