Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood

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.

The past with its pleasures its rewards its foolishness its punishments is there for each of us forever and it should be.

Men should be either treated generously or destroyed, because they take revenge for slight injuries - for heavy ones they cannot.

We were like deer. They were like grizzly bear.

Faith in Christ and a reliance on ourselves, even to the smallest degree, are mutually exclusive.

You know, the finest line a man will walk is between success at work and success at home.

The argument that today's National Guardsmen, members of a select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to keep and bear arms has no historical foundation.

All medicine comes down to this: Find out what's bugging you; get rid of it. Find out what you need; get it. The body does the rest.

Only after I've seen the visible can I imagine what the invisible is.

I think Arminianism is death to Christianity!

We are weakened and we are tired, but we are not done yet.