I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor..

The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my….

When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence c….

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts..

I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy migh….

When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're….

Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it's no more than a gift on loan..

We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they wer….

Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead gho….

My favorite optimist was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window washers heard him say, 'So….

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth centur….

Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood.

I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the ….

I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is ….

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners b….

Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and ….

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance..

As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn't write. It's a process of discovery..

...with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very i….

The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious li….

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is ….