I’m beginning now even to see it in my own books which are written from many different points of view, very different personae, first person as a man, a child, a woman, a young person, an older person, there is the sense, looking back, that you are really writing one book all your life. Because there is this voyage of discovery of life.

I am interested in telling my particular truth as I have seen it.

I have desired, like every artist, to create a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant, and significant things of this marred and clumsy world, and to show in a vision something of the face of Ireland to any of my own people who would look where I bid them. I have therefore
written down accurately and candidly much that I have heard and seen,
and, except by way of commentary, nothing that I have merely imagined.

So this book... [is] my personal quest for the ultimate nature of reality.

Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.

I have tried to write the exact truth as I saw and see it about both myself and other people, since a book of this kind has no value unless it is honest... It is not by accident that what I have written constitutes, in effect, the indictment of a civilisation.

In other words, I look through my eyes and see only a version of the world, a version that can be, and often is, colored or twisted by what I want to see. Another person may witness the same events, and yet observe something entirely different.

I’m very interested in presenting the truth of people who are not centered in mainstream narratives. But I’m also fascinated by how we construct our version of truth, by how two people can have the same experience and not only describe it differently but also believe that their version is the only truth. The novel I’m currently working on excavates this phenomenon.

My sincere desire in the composition of the book was to give the true view of the history of nature, with as little disturbance as possible to existing beliefs, whether philosophical or religious.

Hence thou mayst see what my conceptions were, when I began to write; and now I must tell thee, they are still the same, nor hath my long experience weakened them at all, but invincibly confirmed them.

If one hundred people perceive the same event, you hear one hundred different stories, and everybody claims that his or her story is the true story. Of course, it's only true for that person, and your story is only true for you. What we share with one another is just our perception; it is just our point of view. And it's completely normal because the only thing we have is our point of view. You know, the way we create our stories is very interesting. We have a tendency to distort everything we perceive to make it agree with what we already believe; we "fix it" to make it agree with our lies. It is amazing how we do this. With awareness, we recover the control of our story. That is the good news. If we don't like our story, we are the authors; we can change it.

I’ve written about all kinds of things and every one of my books is very different from the others, which delights me. You can say that I have carved a style out of all my various resources, out of being different in every book.

In a myriad of ways you tell one truth.

I've tried to stay true to myself this whole entire time, and I think I've represented myself as creatively as I could with what I got on the show.