Quotes from Sally Rooney

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 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.

I don't think of myself as busy because I don't even have to get dressed most days.

To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.

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.

A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.

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.

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'm interested in how we can put political principles into practice in our personal lives and the limits of theory when it comes to our desires and needs.

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.

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 would rather do two things really, really, really well than do 16 things and have 14 of them fail.

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 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.

I thought school was immensely boring, and as a teenager, I often found social life quite mystifying... I was not someone to whom it came easily to be charming.

I couldn't quite get the hang of how to socialise as a teenager. I didn't really understand it.

It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. 'La La Land' was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.

I think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 definitely don't aspire to writing that's 'timeless,' whatever that means.