We are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We're also all the kindnesses we did. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don't understand time.

My life is every moment of my life. It is not a culmination of the past.

A thing well done is worth doing.

There is only one immutable law in life - in a gentleman's toilet, incoming traffic has the right of way.

Sometimes silence resolves a conversation confused by Mad Misconstruction.

Gossip is more popular than literature.

The problem with Ireland is that it's a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent.

I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

An Irishman will always soften bad news, so that a major coronary is no more than 'a bad turn' and a near hurricane that leaves thousands homeless is 'good drying weather'.

In life there exist two classes: first class and no class.

Just because they're a story doesn't mean they're not real.

To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.

In the end I didn't know who I was crying for, but it was something my body wanted to do, as though trying to digest grief.

Possibility is what drives us.

The bigger you get, the harder this gets because the more aggressive the people working for you are.

Any business is the same in the beginning because nobody knows where it's going to ride.

L'imagination est la reine du vrai, et le possible est une des provinces du vrai. Imagination is the queen of the truth and the possible is one of the provinces of the truth.

Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character.

This hunger for profits causes great misery for the people.