The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.

Make sure, as often as possible, you are doing something you’d be happy to die doing.

Flowers, after love, must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

The first rule of marriage: solve the mystery, end the love.

And yet, I was scared of falling asleep, because the moment I fell asleep my wounds would heal and right then I didn’t want that to happen. Right then, I found a strange but real comfort in the pain.

No one will understand you. It is not, ultimately, that important. What is important is that you understand you.

So love is about finding the right person to hurt you?”“Pretty much.

The next day I had a hangover.I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.

Humans, in the day that has been the Earth, have been here for less than a minute. We’re a late-night piss in the toilet, that’s all we are.

Laughter, I realized, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie.

Until you know how to change yourself for the better, you cannot change others.

The world won't be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.

If there were no schools to take the children away from home part of the time, the insane asylums would be filled with mothers.

We'll be submitting healthcare sometime in early March [2017], mid March, and after that, we're going to come up, and we're doing very well on tax reform.

People still talk about a British sense of humour, or French slapstick or how the Germans have no sense of humour - and it's just rubbish. I do strongly feel that we are all the bloody same.

Man, sometimes God really sucks.

When Andy died, I just drank to dumb my mind.

And I began to feel sorry for myself; for so many years, my drawer full of memories had held the same old stories.

I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.

History of Ireland--lawlessness and turbulency, robbery and oppression, hatred and revenge, blind selfishness everywhere--no principle, no heroism. What can be done with it?