Sally Rooney

It's so difficult to be conscious of a development of a style. You find yourself writing in a certain style, and the analysis of how you came to it can only ever be applied retroactively. You're never conscious of why you're producing it.

If you look at the history of the letter in the novel, small changes in the British postal service became really significant because of how quickly people are suddenly able to communicate, and letters actually arrive at the intended time, and they arrive to the correct recipient. All of this is really important to a plot.

There are a lot of people who probably enjoyed 'Conversations with Friends' who are part of the system that is actively exploiting other people's labour. I am sure there are landlords who read it and thought it was a great read. Am I happy that I have given those people 10 hours of distraction? Not really!

In everything I do, my principal inspiration is the 1996 Belle & Sebastian album 'If You're Feeling Sinister.'

My friendships all tend to be quite steady, so it's really hard to novelise that stuff because it's just boring. I mean, there's interesting conversations, but there's no power struggle. And you can't work with equilibrium; you have to work with something that's just off and then observe how it tries to correct itself.

It really felt like my generation was deprived of a future that we believed was ours. I don't mean some hugely privileged future where we all have gigantic houses. I mean having a job.

I'm interested in how we can put political principles into practice in our personal lives and the limits of theory when it comes to our desires and needs.