I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.

My favorite optimist was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window washers heard him say, 'So Far, so good.'

When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody.

We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.

When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

Luck generally comes to those who look for it, and my notion is that it taps, once in a lifetime, at everybody's door, but if industry does not open it luck goes away.

I cannot sing, dance or act; what else would I be but a talk show host.

A good name is still to be preferred to great riches. Especially is it to be preferred to the appearance of riches, acquired with nothing down and nothing to pay for two months.

Boxing is like jazz. The better it is, the less people appreciate it.

Let me be serious: divorce is a sacred institution between a man and a woman who hate each other. God wanted Adam to pay alimony to Eve, not Steve.

After my marriage she edited everything I wrote. And what is more, she not only edited my works, she edited me.

I could have signed for Newcastle when I was 17, but I decided I would be better off at Carlisle. I'd had a drink that night.

Life only avails, not the having lived.

You are never more than a half-step away from a right note.