I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are you come out and hope that no one runs away.

If someone decides to be a musician now it means because there is no hope of money at the end of it it means they really want to be a musician. And if someone is writing now there is no hope for money at the end of it.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

But yeah I'm really happy when I'm writing. When I'm being creative and when I have something that I can put down. You know if you go out and you overhear a conversation or you have a thought you have a receptacle to go home and say 'Oh this would be great in this script.' Your antenna's out in a different way and I love that time.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books.

I got a scholarship to Seattle University and I was writing arrangements for singers and everybody. But the music course was too dry and I really wanted to get away from home.

The best thing that ever happened to me is that nothing happened in writing. I ended up working for engineering companies and that's where I found my material in the everyday struggle between capitalism and grace. Being broke and tired you don't come home your best self.

I like to think of myself at home in the armchair writing smoking and occasionally wandering down the shop.

There's a continuity between what I care about in any form: I care about it in my music in article-writing in how I dress in how I live in my relationships in how I navigate paparazzi how I decorate my home. There's such a continuity between everything that I don't really care what form it shows up in.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact as of the writing of this column millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective that is all that writing is about.

Irish fiction is full of secrets guilty pasts divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she or he is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Great writing can be done in biography history art.

Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history for instance because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.

It is like writing history with lightning and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it.