Sarah Moss

The award-winning author – whose new novel Make Strange is out now – on motherhood, publishing and making a living from fiction

Nothing about floor-shaking music, other people’s sweat and alarming metal contraptions tempts me

I’m not insulted and if it makes others more comfortable to think that’s why I’m not drinking, it’s fine by me

It’s not clear to me on what moral basis I would refuse publication in Putin’s Russia while signing gratefully for Trump’s America

Am I supposed to take comfort or pleasure in the greater hardship of others? Or is it that there’s a suffering competition?

Wanting to write without wanting to read is, at best, trying to skip the first stage of an artistic apprenticeship

When you take to the streets in protest, you do so in a position of radical vulnerability. Think of the lone figure before the tanks in Tiananmen Square

How different would Ireland have been this last century if the tears of women were a national emergency?

‘We didn’t talk about these things in my day’ seems to cover whatever range is convenient, and it never holds up

Friends who can look thoughtfully on conflict and sadness and trouble and still find charity and curiosity are precious

I like the way replacing but with and invites me to think. It’s an invitation, not a command

It’s not a bad lesson at any age, to know how to take our pleasures at a lower altitude

The Irish arrangement affirms bonds through generosity and obligation

I rarely carry water and my bodily systems seem to run just fine

The pleasure of thinking about prehistoric people was never that of laying claim to land or heritage but of familiarity and strangeness

The word ‘reason’, like ‘natural’ and ‘common sense’, often alerts us to a hidden agenda

In most situations, data promotes safety only when someone knows what to do about it

Choosing from a menu of deficits for your hair, skin and body is not freedom

The adults in my life had cause to doubt my word, because I did a lot of imagining and I wasn’t always sure what I’d made up

You’ll see very few helmets on cyclists in the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium, certainly no laws mandating their use

When the technology of 19th-century prisons is sold to us as healthful, it’s worth asking some questions

Is it possible to care a little less about what other people think without a lessening of attention to how other people feel?

A friend in her 30s tells me her contemporaries are living in fear of perimenopause, which wasn’t even a word until recently

However awful the state of the world, more people are living longer, healthier and probably happier lives now than ever

I have deep faith in incompatible truths, in complexity and an instinctive resistance to childish tales of good and evil

The works of the 18th century author are about so much more than love, exploring female friendship, power struggles and survival in a patriarchal society

People tend to behave worse at home, among family, than with friends and colleagues

The idea that we would deliquesce into slothfulness without the whips of capitalism is untested but probably untrue

I am generally of the view that children should learn and adults should practise a clear articulation of needs and desires

The night silence of the country is thick and deep, not so much broken as amplified by the occasional call of an owl or fox

Many tasks extend to fill the time available but if you start work on Christmas months in advance, it will take months

Don’t live in an area of high air pollution; avoid the chemicals on this list; buy an electric car: insidious messaging sells us individual solutions to structural problems

Call me a killjoy but I am disturbed by the sight of plastic bones in plastic chains

We shouldn’t live every day as if it were our last because then the bathroom would never be cleaned, the bills never paid, the homework never done

There is a fruitful ground between scarcity and excess, in which intelligence and creativity make rich use of limited resources

We contain multitudes. We don’t have to be afraid of ambiguity and difficulty

You can have your own reason for doing what you’re doing - just know what it is

I feel vulnerable or uncomfortable but I’m not alone. Other people are like me, even if none of them is here

It’s good for all of us to have people in the habit of thinking critically and evaluating primary and secondary sources

A lot of us women, after years of wearing ‘neutral’ shades, discover a midlife passion for strong colour