This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.

It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

The how of any betrayal was the hardest part to justify. How the lies can be assembled and stacked and maintained until the truth was completely hidden behind them.

Never invest your money in anything that eats or needs repairing.

An investment in education always pays the highest returns.

Art is an intersection of many human needs.

Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music.

Not sure how I feel about reality. I'm going to begin purchasing stuffed animals and endowing them with the qualities people in my life lack.

I'm a social writer in the sense that I want to record, but not in the sense of trying to change people's minds.

We Irish are born dreamers; sometimes we never wake up at all, and then we're counted failures.

You have to create different things, either through lighting or changing the format of the songs and how you're going to sing them, and even sometimes props.

I wanted to make an unashamed pop record. I became obsessed with Disney soundtracks from the '50s, so I decided to make my own.