To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more becaus….

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious..

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye..

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren….

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life..

It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates ever….

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities….

Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, w….

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to ….

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?.

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature..

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me..

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night..

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders..

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment..

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed..

When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it..

... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring..

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul..

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things..

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt..