It's hard for me to measure them, or to assess my books because I'm so close to them.

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.

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.

Your purpose is to remember your purpose

But there is one cool thingabout having a weirdo mother.She works so hard at rememberingwhere she left herselfshe doesn’t have timeto work on me.

Winners recognize that even when they aren’t physically selling a product, they are always selling themselves. Every human interaction is an opportunity to connect—and then to sell.

You don't have to live in the country and grow your own food to be green.

My biggest thing is to teach not to focus on the aesthetic. It's really about who you are, and the human being, that makes you beautiful.

It is in the darkness of their eyes that men lose their way.

Lips half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.

What men call friendship is no more than a partnership, a mutual care of interests, an exchange of favors - in a word, it is a sort of traffic, in which self-love ever proposes to be the gainer.

Joy always came after pain.

What is the greatest deficiency among human Chrsitians? They have an inadequate view of human suffering.