I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception

Don’t you ever feel that – that you just need to get away? From everything? That it’s all too much?

You don’t have to like your family, you don’t even have to spend time with them, to know them right down to the bone.

For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright

In TV writing, Armando Iannucci’s satire ‘The Thick of It’ is brilliant – equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-he-actually-said-that – and it’s got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.

Donna Tartt blows me away – that impeccable writing, so rich you could eat it and so luminous that it lights up the whole room, and the way she brings her characters to life so completely and in such fine detail that you know them as intimately as your dearest friends.

My night stand is permanently jammed with books I want to read.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that’s fine; you only need to get it right once.

Both back when I was acting and now that I’m writing, I’ve always wanted the same thing out of my career: to be able to get up in the morning and do what I love doing.

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we’ve been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

I like writing about big turning points, where professional and personal lives coalesce, where the boundaries are coming down, and you’re faced with a set of choices which will change life forever.

I thought I could never write a proper book; I’d never done it before. But I thought I could write a sequence. Then I had a chapter. The next thing I knew I was turning acting down.

I’d always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.