Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.
But if I ever fight in Northern Ireland again, I want it to be at Windsor Park.
You think that religion is a thing that is there to help you and to see you through life, and then you wake up one morning and find the entire Irish situation, the civil war that's based on religion.
I mean I grew up in Ireland, so one would have to be consciously blinkered not to have reflected on the issue of political violence because that was the story since I was 19 years old or 20.
Britain has the IRA and no one cancels concerts there.
Belfast during the Troubles looked like a different world.
I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew - people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don't remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week.
My feet always danced to Irish traditional music, but I was very glad to get out of the North of Ireland in the mid-Seventies when it was really closed and tight and relentlessly unforgiving.
My parents were Belfast Catholics.
I was born in Northern Ireland in 1951. I lived most of my life there until 1986 or 1987.
I'd like to play Ian Paisley, actually. I'd need building up, though he's very frail now.
I was one of the many kids in Northern Ireland who grew up in the countryside and had an idyllic childhood well away from the Troubles.
We've done a lot of films now about the IRA, we can move on from all that. I loved '71 because I think it showed a very honest trail and what it was actually like. It wasn't one-sided. I really respect ['71 director] Yann [Demange] for what he did. But we have done a lot of those things.
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.
I grew up during one of Northern Ireland's most complex periods.
I've never read anything set in Belfast that doesn't involve the Troubles or something senseless over a flag.
I grew up in Derry, of course, and it was - Derry was the worst example of Northern Ireland's discrimination.
A lot of people of my Ulster Protestant background would have been very suspicious of the notion of a film about Bloody Sunday. Our fear would have been that it would be terribly anti-Britain and anti-soldiers: a piece of nationalist propaganda.
It's an extraordinary thing, this tiny little province of Northern Ireland, where carnage happened. And I was part of it. I grew up in it.
I've always been fascinated with Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, having lived in London in the '80s when there was an Irish republican bombing campaign there.
