When something has been perfect there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.

It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.

History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.

... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

A nation dies culturally and spiritually first. Its money and its army are the last to go, but go they do once the light goes out in the nation's soul.

A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.

Intellectual isolation always follows commercial isolation.

I have lots of favourite memories but I can't say that I have a favourite film.

They say that depression is anger you turn on yourself, and I think women do that.

[A]s previous studies have concluded, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are probably thickening rather than melting.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

Heaven is high and earth wide. If you ride three feet higher above the ground than other men, you will know what that means.

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.

The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die The broken cartwheel on the hill.