Kevin Barry

I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.

Libraries are where we learn that we can live our lives through books.

When you wake up, instead of checking emails on your phone, or counting your retweets, pick up a pen and scratch a few sentences into a notebook.

Old age treats freelance writers pretty gently.

I am a disaster magnet. I came home from our first anniversary vacation with jellyfish stings, a puncture wound from a wrought iron pineapple and a cork-shaped bruise in my cleavage.

But I will say that living in Ireland has changed the cadence and fullness of speech, since the Irish love words and use as many of them in a sentence as possible.