Quotes from Sally Rooney

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.

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 feel like I could devote myself to far more important things than writing novels.

I try not to let myself get too wrapped up in the image of whatever my books have become in the outside world.

Dialogue is the most fun to write. It's kind of like a tennis match.

We're not always the most insightful about ourselves.

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.

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.

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.

You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute.

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.

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.

In everything I do, my principal inspiration is the 1996 Belle & Sebastian album 'If You're Feeling Sinister.'

I think it's best for me to kind of just plough on doing whatever interests me, just following my own whims, because otherwise, I would think, 'Oh well, I have to write something now that really represents my generation or that really represents young Irish people.'

I can't help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings.

When I read interviews with people like Kevin Barry or Colin Barrett, who I hugely admire, they don't really seem to come up against the question of likeability even though their characters, in some instances, are really horrible.

My friendships all tend to be quite steady, so it's really hard to novelise that stuff because it's just boring. I mean, there's interesting conversations, but there's no power struggle. And you can't work with equilibrium; you have to work with something that's just off and then observe how it tries to correct itself.

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.

One thing debating did was bring me in contact with a whole social world that I had never experienced before. It's sort of a very international, very niche hobby.

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.

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.

I started writing 'Normal People' not knowing that anyone would read it, not knowing that anyone would read the first book, so I didn't really have any hang ups about, 'Oh, I can't do this again. I've done this already.' It was just a project I was working on for my own amusement.

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.

I am not trying to speak for anyone else, never mind an entire generation. I don't even know what that means.