Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.