I called the boss a ‘fucker’ one day – not to his face, but it got back to him – so that was the end. - Philip Ó Ceallaigh

I meet people who tell me things like, ‘I read your book in two days’. Please don’t do that. These things take me years to write. Slow down. Everything you read, slow down. Reading is our great act of resistance in this age of speed and carelessness.

The real writers are tenacious creatures, and they found a way long before there were writers workshops and creative writing courses in the universities. In the absence of formal frameworks, personal initiatives and informal frameworks become more important.

I used to write in the Rathmines public library. I was on the dole and living in a bedsit down the road. It was too cold to write at home. I had one of those meters that you had to put 50p into. So I'd go down the library every morning and after lunch to scribble stuff in longhand in the study room there.