My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

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.

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.

Silence is an arguement hard to refute

Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

Enthusiasm - a distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

Well, my smile's pretty hard to miss, considering I'm a gal who likes her lipstick-the redder the better.

Universal silence is taken to imply the consent of the people.

Once I can talk to people, I switch them over on my side.

The river of time may fork into rivers, in which case you have a parallel reality and so then you can become a time traveler and not have to worry about causing a time paradox.