With acting, you have to depend on somebody else to decide if you are allowed to work. You can spend weeks and months when you are not acting at all.

When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.

Both back when I was acting and now that I'm writing, I've always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I'd never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.