Mike McCormack

"You always think that if youre going to spend seven years on a book, it should be Gravitys Rainbow or Ulysses or something, but mine is just a 200-page book that took a long time."

"This is going to sound really childish, but Ive been intrigued by Romania ever since the 1976 Olympics, when Nadia Comăneci, the little gymnast, scored a perfect 10. And I thought any country that gave that to the world had to be wonderful, so I read up a lot on it. When the 1989 revolutions broke out, I remember cheering them on. They were the last ones to make a bid for freedom, and it was the bloodiest and the most spectacular of the revolutions. It was almost French in its drama, like the French Revolution."

"I nearly went fucking crazy crazy. [[w:Notes from a Coma|Notes [from a Coma]]] marked a sort of natural breakdown with Jonathan Cape. The book got a good critical response but it didnt too well. So publishers look at you then and think, okay, he writes good books but . . . If you have that experimental twist, you make things hard for yourself. So for those five years, I couldnt give my work away. It was tough on me and for people around me. But as my wife Maeve said to me, it isnt my job to get published . . . it is my job to write."