SALLY ROONEY

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.

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.

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 have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

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.'

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.

As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often.

Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don't really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it's better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.

I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'm not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature.

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.

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

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 hate Yeats! A lot of his poems are not very good, but some are obviously okay. But how has he become this sort of emblem of literary Irishness when he was this horrible man? He was a huge fan of Mussolini. He was really into fascism. He believed deeply in the idea of a 'noble class' who are superior by birth to the plebs.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I'm only interested in writing about relationships.