Sally Rooney

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 like Christianity. I'm a fan of Jesus and his whole philosophy but not the social teaching aspects of it, of course.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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