There's a continuity between what I care about in any form: I care about it in my music in article-writing in how I dress in how I live in my relationships in how I navigate paparazzi how I decorate my home. There's such a continuity between everything that I don't really care what form it shows up in.

I can remember being home from school with tonsillitis and writing stories in bed to pass the time.

Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact as of the writing of this column millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective that is all that writing is about.

Irish fiction is full of secrets guilty pasts divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she or he is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.