Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.

After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is 'The Book of British Birds,' and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.

A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.

Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.

Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.

If I were to sit down and count them, how many of my prayers were tainted by the seduction of greed? None, simply because nothing of that sort is a prayer.

Love is a poison, ' her father responded. 'One you grow accustomed to, but does not kill you.

I don’t shy from writing about incredibly unpleasant, distressing things. And I get a kick out of it I confess. I like doing that.

I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.

The worse a situation becomes the less it takes to turn it around, the bigger the upside.

One month, two months, I am ready to accept any accord on this point that has the approval of the inspectors.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

In the search for truth - that everything in nature seems to hide - man needs the assistance of all his faculties. All the senses should be awake.

I prefer the material woman.

I think Facebook's dangerous. So many people I know get into trouble with Facebook... I'd rather just pick up the phone. Or Skype.