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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Awestruck, Flora stared at the dishevelled sisters with their blazing faces and radiant ragged wings, who smelled of no kin but the wild high air.

It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.

Break a leg up there, and I'll be down here hopefully breaking someone elses.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.

Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.

I love feeling that I am opening new worlds for people who don't have time to investigate these things themselves.

Sam: “I—it’s—I’m not an animal.

Faeries are equally loyal and deceitful.

There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.