Top 60 Sally Rooney Quotes

I gave myself the small task of writing honestly about the kind of life I knew. I believe there is some value in carrying out that task, however limited.

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 think my characters are all fairly fundamentally decent, even if they have negative characteristics.

In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also – philosophically, politically – I just feel like that’s the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I’m not interested in human individuality; I don’t even know what that means.

I don’t really believe in the idea of the individual.

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

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

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.

I started writing ‘Normal People’ not knowing that anyone would read it, not knowing that anyone would read the first book, so I didn’t really have any hang ups about, ‘Oh, I can’t do this again. I’ve done this already.’ It was just a project I was working on for my own amusement.

I don’t have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it’s certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.

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

I try not to let myself get too wrapped up in the image of whatever my books have become in the outside world.

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

I was on the Internet a lot during my teenage years, and I think the influence of that kind of textuality on my writing has been pretty significant.

Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don’t really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it’s better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.

As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached ‘The Aeneid’ just as I would a contemporary poem or novel – and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.

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

I try not to let myself get too wrapped up in the image of whatever my books have become in the outside world.

I don’t really believe in the idea of the individual.

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!

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.

One thing debating did was bring me in contact with a whole social world that I had never experienced before. It’s sort of a very international, very niche hobby.

I was on the Internet a lot during my teenage years, and I think the influence of that kind of textuality on my writing has been pretty significant.

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.

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

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

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

In my fiction, I pursue this idea of intimacy, but also – philosophically, politically – I just feel like that’s the interesting question for me. How much can we share with other people? I’m not interested in human individuality; I don’t even know what that means.

It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. ‘La La Land’ was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.

Dominant and emerging forms of interpersonal communication have to find their way into literary language somehow – think of the epistolary novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.

I try to keep my sentences quite pared back. What I really want to do is observe people’s relationships and interactions. I don’t want language to get in the way of that. It’s quite a difficult process to achieve that, for the language to feel clear.

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

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

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

We’re not always the most insightful about ourselves.

When I read interviews with people like Kevin Barry or Colin Barrett, who I hugely admire, they don’t really seem to come up against the question of likeability even though their characters, in some instances, are really horrible.

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

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

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!

I am not trying to speak for anyone else, never mind an entire generation. I don’t even know what that means.

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

I don’t have any answers as to whether the Internet is a good or a bad thing, but it’s certainly an important thing for the novel because novels are so much about communication, and when communication changes, the novel has to change.

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.

Writing in the first person, you immediately open yourself up to the idea that there’s a connection between you and the narrator.

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

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

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.

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.

Class is something that I think seriously about and try to organise my politics around. I think there are lots of novels that don’t really engage with questions of class at all, and they get less conversation about issues of social privilege than I do. But it’s better to try and talk about it and maybe fail.

We’re not always the most insightful about ourselves.

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 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’m only interested in writing about relationships.

To feel that literature has any politically redemptive power at all just seems increasingly naive.

One thing debating did was bring me in contact with a whole social world that I had never experienced before. It’s sort of a very international, very niche hobby.