I'm not recognised that much. I'm just a bald man in glasses and there's a rash of them in Dublin. It'd be different if I had a mohican.

If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing.

You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

It's a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it is a dreary little dump most of the time.

I see people in terms of dialogue and I believe that people are their talk.

Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal.

Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.

It's great meeting children because you never know what they will say.

I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.

She marched to the door and said, "if I ever marry, Patrick O'Sullivan, I shall make sure that my mate for life is a decent woman, or even, maybe, a book.

If we had more hell in the pulpit, we would have less hell in the pew.

Perhaps that's how I should think of them, Polly thought, the troupe and Miss Snelgrove and Trot. And Sir Godfrey. Not as lost to her, but as removed to this moment in time for safekeeping.

You can tell when something's not moving forward anymore. When the doubts you have about it don't go away.

Vegas is purposefully constructed as a self-enclosed and isolated biosphere, sort of what a recreational colony built on the moon might be like.

Someone bemoaned that there were so few women in economics. But there are also very few men in economics.

He rarely knows the result of a battle when the battle is over.

He is hailed a conqueror of conquerors. [Lat., Victor victorum cluet.]

Now the Earth with many flowers puts on her spring embroidery

Everything in moderation. And that includes a couple of beers a day.