A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

I don't pretend reality is the same for everyone.

For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.

Of course I loved books more than people.

A good story is always more dazzling than a broken piece of truth.

But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.

What better place to kill time than a library?

I've nothing against people who love truth. Apart from the fact that they make dull companions.

Our clients' faces, with the customary outward paleness and inner glow of the book lover.

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

What he did to my heart was sheer, inexplicable, magic.

I don't hate Republicans as individuals. But I hate what the Republicans are doing to this country. I really do.

Hark! that's the nightingale Telling the self-same tale Her song told when this ancient earth was young: So echoes answered when her song was sung In the first wooded vale.

He's going to be what?! Oh for God's sake. Sir David Beckham? You're having a laugh. He's just a good footballer with a famous bird.

To enjoy my music, you need depth and emotionality.

There are different paths that one can pursue as a painter. I work with the thesis that I have not as yet reached my goal. This engagement is the necessary basis from which I plan new paintings.

I'm interested in the history of ideas and how these ideas take on flesh and influence culture, and the church.

The EU is mired in deep structural crisis. Greece, Portugal and Ireland cannot survive inside the Euro.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

A character I would love to play is Iago, from Othello.