Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's a valid part of any endeavour, not just writing.

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.

And there above all of these shops hung a blood soaked sign: a red hand, the hand of a child that was neither male nor female and yet roused feelings of the most dejected and criminal love

Those who can't forget are worse off than those who can't remember.

Design is an unknown.

Your mom was right when she told you never to discuss politics and religion because emotions run so high in those arenas. Especially religion.

Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we're all in this together.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

Death comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes.

I can remember picking up weighty tomes on the history of science and the history of philosophy and reading those when I was small.

The world should be worried about those who go around the planet with a can of gasoline in one hand and a box of matches in the other, pretending to sell fire insurance.

I got tired of my taxes paying for exciting little wars around the world. Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.