Sally Rooney: ‘I think I should have read more at university’

This article is part of a series curated by students and recent graduates from colleges and universities in Ireland
Students should read “as much as time allows” in university, advises author Sally Rooney, whose new novel Intermezzo was published this week.
“When I look back on my time in university, I think I should have read more,” the author said in response to queries from two of this week’s Irish Times Magazine’s guest curators.
“I’ve never regretted reading a book, but I’ve often regretted neglecting to read one. Every other aspect of the university experience is probably fairly subjective. But I would recommend reading as much as time allows.”
Rooney also clarified her use of quotation marks in dialogue within her novels, replying to a question on whether or not this might be a reference to the work of Cormac McCarthy. Rooney pointed out that James Joyce didn’t mark out speech with quotes either, going on to distinguish between the real and the imagined.
“I use them in non-fiction whenever I want to quote another person or text. They serve to alert the reader that I am using someone else’s words – like a pair of tongs used to handle a foreign object,” Rooney said.
“In my novels, however, I am not using anyone else’s words. All the words are written by me, including the dialogue. Nothing needs to be handled with a pair of tongs. Of course, I could use quotation marks to pretend that I’m quoting my characters, but that would seal off the dialogue from the rest of the narrative rather artificially. I prefer the text of the novel to flow smoothly, without those little bits of things floating all over every page.”
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The questions to Rooney were posted by Jenny Maguire of Trinity College Dublin and and University College Cork’s Tess O’Regan