JOSEPH O'NEILL

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

When I read James Joyce, I'm not really interested in the Dublin of 1904. I'm interested in being in the presence of a voice and a sensibility underpinned by an authenticity which, I think, if you're a good writer, you can extract from the specific details of your own time. I think most writers do hope that their books will be read in ten years.

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

It takes a long, long time to write what I do write.

I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

I think if you're writing about cricket, you're obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer.

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.

It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again.

If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.

I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.

There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?