Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.

Not watching TV gets me in a lot of trouble in my household because my wife and daughter have a lot of shows they like to watch.

Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into.

What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn.

Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.

It is a curious fact that the word essayist showed up in English before it existed in French.

At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want.

The city of Cork - the urban center, where all the shops and bars and everything are - is actually an island, a river island.

A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time.

I'm just saying, take courage. That and pretty much that alone is never the incorrect thing to do.

Reputation is what men and women think of us

These sciences are camel stallions — use books to line them up these couplets are runaways — use books for them as halters.

They can because they think they can.

But first be a person who needs people. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.

You must be in fashion is the utterance of weak headed mortals.

I learned early about the misery and dangers of life, and about the afterlife, about the external punishment which awaited the children of sin in Hell.

There are three way of courting ruin -- women, gambling, and calling in technicians.

My mom and my dad never pushed me into performing. They never prohibited me from trying anything, or being anything. They never restricted me in any way. For which I'll be forever grateful.

The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.

Let us not wonder if something happens which never was before, or if something doth not appear among us with which the ancients were acquainted.