Because I've been so bad at looking after myself, how would I ever look after a kid? But the old cliche applied: they handed her to me, and my world turned upside down - and I realised I was now going to be vulnerable in more ways than I expected.
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I decided to write books, just to prove to myself that I was still alive, if nothing else.
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I'd kill to be a poet.
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We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.
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I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
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Whenever dark things happen in my life, there is always some dark humour.
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The tourist board have put a bounty on me head, but they like the biz from tourists.
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I committed a cardinal sin as a kid. I never spoke, and my mother thought there was something seriously wrong with me. A silent child is regarded as a problem in Ireland, and I just read all the time.
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Jack Taylor was a private investigator in Galway, which seemed like madness. I used lots of Galway-isms, which seemed like madness, too.
