I love disturbing things.  I call some writing knitting.  I don’t want knitting.  And disturbing and fierce and upsetting and searing things, far from depressing, actually lift one because we all at times in our life, whatever our work or our fate is, understand and enter into those realms of blood and despair.  But reading a work like that doesn’t add to our despair.  It just is a mirror for us to see a lot of the troubled part of ourselves and there is a place for that in art.  Others would disagree and they say – you know – that art is all about beauty.  Well, William De Kooning or Francis Bacon and a lot of painters – er – my favourite, Mark Rothko – are not about beauty.  There is beauty in them, but there’s beauty bloodied.

Edna O’Brien.