I think with every writer there are two people there.

My life is every moment of my life. It is not a culmination of the past.

A thing well done is worth doing.

There is only one immutable law in life - in a gentleman's toilet, incoming traffic has the right of way.

Sometimes silence resolves a conversation confused by Mad Misconstruction.

Gossip is more popular than literature.

The problem with Ireland is that it's a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent.

I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

An Irishman will always soften bad news, so that a major coronary is no more than 'a bad turn' and a near hurricane that leaves thousands homeless is 'good drying weather'.

In life there exist two classes: first class and no class.

There's more than what the eye can see, the heart can love, and the brain can understand.

And there you sit, gloating over what you have done, as if you were a martyr or a public benefactor -- as complacent and smug and misunderstood as a princess from the moon forced to herd goats!

A magic came out of your smileGold thread of gold threadStars illuminating the skyThereWhere in the mountain streamHealing waterTears of ice as a gift to me

Be proud to be out of your mind and out of control.

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.

You will die not because you're ill, but because you're alive.

Time is in the mind, space is in the mind. The law of cause and effect is also a way of thinking. In reality all is here and now and all is one. Multiplicity and diversity are in the mind only.

The heart and soul of school culture is what people believe, the assumptions they make about how school works.

My house is completely organized from my closets to my drawers.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true.