New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin..

Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late….

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it..

It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you l….

I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes we….

I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed..

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you..

Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book..

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe..

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium..

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer..

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway..

You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakab….

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to acc….

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day..

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man..

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves..