Dialogue is the most fun to write. It's kind of like a tennis match.
Sally Rooney
You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.
The idea for 'Conversations with Friends' - two college students who befriend a married couple - struck me at first as a concept for a short story. I started to write it under the title 'Melissa,' and eventually, it got too long.
I think the debating thing actually helped to establish to me that being popular was completely worthless. I didn't enjoy the social dynamic and immediately left after becoming number one. But it felt like I needed to do it to know what it was like. It wasn't just that I was an aggressive person, although that probably is true to an extent.
I hate Yeats! A lot of his poems are not very good, but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini. He was really into fascism. He believed deeply in the idea of a 'noble class' who are superior by birth to the plebs.
I can't help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings.
I don't think of myself as busy because I don't even have to get dressed most days.
The window in which it's acceptable to listen to Ella Fitzgerald's 1960 record 'Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas' is short, so I keep it in heavy rotation throughout the festive season.
We're not always the most insightful about ourselves.
Being shortlisted for the Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize is, of course, a real honour for me and my work. When I wrote 'Conversations with Friends,' it was hard for me to imagine the book even finding readers - so it's a huge privilege to find it judged alongside such exciting and innovative new writing. I'm very grateful.
I was on the Internet a lot during my teenage years, and I think the influence of that kind of textuality on my writing has been pretty significant.
To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.
The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along.
I couldn't quite get the hang of how to socialise as a teenager. I didn't really understand it.
There are a lot of experimental novels that test the boundaries of what the novel is, and 'Conversations' is not one of those. It's conventional in its structure, even though its prose style and the themes it explores and the politics that underpin it, maybe, are on the experimental side. Its basic structure is pretty conventional.
Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don't really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it's better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.
In everything I do, my principal inspiration is the 1996 Belle & Sebastian album 'If You're Feeling Sinister.'
What does it mean to have a healthy relationship? It's such a strangely clinical way of talking about interpersonal dynamics, like you can do a white blood cell count and say, 'No, it's not looking good for that one.' It's impossible to have a loving relationship in which you never cause pain and no pain ever is caused to you.
I would rather do two things really, really, really well than do 16 things and have 14 of them fail.
I try not to let myself get too wrapped up in the image of whatever my books have become in the outside world.
As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached 'The Aeneid' just as I would a contemporary poem or novel - and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.
It really felt like my generation was deprived of a future that we believed was ours. I don't mean some hugely privileged future where we all have gigantic houses. I mean having a job.
I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another.
I'm very introverted. Easily a few days could go by where I would not really leave the house or talk to anybody other than my partner.
I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people's relationships and interactions. I don't want language to get in the way of that. It's quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.
In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also - philosophically, politically - I just feel like that's the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I'm not interested in human individuality; I don't even know what that means.
I don't have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it's certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.
As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.
What I really like about Woody Allen's films is that there's a real investment in personal relationships. There is the idea that this is a serious concern worth making serious art about - how we love other people and how we can negotiate our relationships with them.
I'm only interested in writing about relationships.
I am not trying to speak for anyone else, never mind an entire generation. I don't even know what that means.
I definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.
I like Christianity. I'm a fan of Jesus and his whole philosophy but not the social teaching aspects of it, of course.
You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas.
I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.
Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow - think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
For me, watching Mohamed Salah play football is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small.
It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.
I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated.
I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.
A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.
If you look at the history of the letter in the novel, small changes in the British postal service became really significant because of how quickly people are suddenly able to communicate, and letters actually arrive at the intended time, and they arrive to the correct recipient. All of this is really important to a plot.
I'm not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature.
Though I have no real understanding of the mechanics of football, and can only nod along helplessly at complex post-match analyses, I do enjoy watching people who are enormously good at something doing that thing very well.
When I was in Trinity, at least for the first couple of years, I didn't really interact with anyone who wasn't in Trinity. A lot of the years, I lived on campus.
When I'm writing something, everything falls into place. When I'm not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there's nowhere to put it all.
A lot of the time, I read something I've written, and I think, 'Well, that's competent. It's not exactly breaking any boundaries. It's not exactly transgressive. It's just a bunch of fake people in a room talking to each other. But maybe there's a value to that.'
I'm not writing to encourage people to read my book or even books in general. That's not my job. My job is to write them. And if people want to read them, that's great.
Everyone has a life. I haven't had a particularly interesting one.
I gave myself the small task of writing honestly about the kind of life I knew. I believe there is some value in carrying out that task, however limited.
