Sally Rooney Quotes

"You can spend hours editing an email but send it as if you wrote it in a minute."

"A lot of the time, I read something I've written, and I think, 'Well, that's competent. It's not exactly breaking any boundaries. It's not exactly transgressive. It's just a bunch of fake people in a room talking to each other. But maybe there's a value to that.'"

"As a reader, I try to love all the literary forms equally, but I probably read novels most often."

"A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know."

"Dialogue is the most fun to write. It's kind of like a tennis match."

"What I really like about Woody Allen's films is that there's a real investment in personal relationships. There is the idea that this is a serious concern worth making serious art about - how we love other people and how we can negotiate our relationships with them."

"Everyone has a life. I haven't had a particularly interesting one."

"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."

"I find myself consistently drawn to writing about intimacy and the way we construct one another."

"I don't really believe in the idea of the individual."

"I can't help feeling that I am not a very important person, and being treated like one gives me strange feelings."

"You cannot write about what people are really like without making a political adjudication. All our ideas of what human nature consists of or how people really feel and experience life are, at their base, political ideas."

"I'm not totally comfortable with the ways in which our culture monetises art and literature."

"I'm not sure that the culture of literary prizes is always a good thing, but while there are literary prizes, it's nice to be nominated."

"I couldn't quite get the hang of how to socialise as a teenager. I didn't really understand it."

"I'm very introverted. Easily a few days could go by where I would not really leave the house or talk to anybody other than my partner."

"I would rather do two things really, really, really well than do 16 things and have 14 of them fail."

"I don't think of myself as busy because I don't even have to get dressed most days."

"The window in which it's acceptable to listen to Ella Fitzgerald's 1960 record 'Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas' is short, so I keep it in heavy rotation throughout the festive season."

"Though I have no real understanding of the mechanics of football, and can only nod along helplessly at complex post-match analyses, I do enjoy watching people who are enormously good at something doing that thing very well."

"For me, watching Mohamed Salah play football is not unlike staring up at the stars and contemplating the vastness of the universe: it makes my own life seem nice and small."

"When I was in Trinity, at least for the first couple of years, I didn't really interact with anyone who wasn't in Trinity. A lot of the years, I lived on campus."

"When I'm writing something, everything falls into place. When I'm not writing, stuff keeps happening to me, and there's nowhere to put it all."

"I'm not writing to encourage people to read my book or even books in general. That's not my job. My job is to write them. And if people want to read them, that's great."

"The idea for 'Conversations with Friends' - two college students who befriend a married couple - struck me at first as a concept for a short story. I started to write it under the title 'Melissa,' and eventually, it got too long."

"The philosophy of individualism owes a great deal to the tradition of novel-writing and novel-reading. In its development and in its aesthetics, the novel is not politically neutral; it has been a participant in history all along."

"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."

"I like Christianity. I'm a fan of Jesus and his whole philosophy but not the social teaching aspects of it, of course."

"I'm only interested in writing about relationships."

"We're not always the most insightful about ourselves."