Colm Tóibín

But then you can't do that.

So you've got to say, I'm going to go on.

I mean, just go on writing.

It's not like Beckett, you know, I can't go on, I must go on.

It's nothing like that.

It's just work.

It's like writing an essay for school.

You know, you must, like you often have to do more than you want to.

But hate is too strong and struggle, all those words are too strong.

I think that hate thing is just too strong.

I think people, writers, talk a lot of rubbish about writing.

Maybe because it's so hard to talk the truth.

It's so hard to work out what it is that you invent all these, you know, I write for my, people say I write for myself.

Well, in that case, don't write then because, you know.

Why don't you just, you know, it's a form of communication no matter what you do.

And there's a sort of also a feeling that if you didn't do it, it would be an awful waste to have all that.

I'm not sure even talent as it were, but have all those skills and impulses and not act on them.

Yeah.

It would be appalling, I think.

Yeah, she's a really great reader.