Dear Mr Skully, I have caught my neck in a mangle and will be indisposed for eternity. Yours in death S.D.

When I die, I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin. I wonder would they know it was me?

On Being Old. It's not nice but take comfort that you won't stay that way for ever.

Writing is turning one's worst moments into money.

I'm starved for love. Not ordinary love but real love. The love that's like music or something.

Expect the worst and that's what you'll get only it will be much worse.

I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.

Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.

Rid the mind of knowledge when looking for pleasure. Or start thinking and find a lot of pain.

I'm all for Christianity, but insolence must be put down.

Grief—in all of its agony—burrowed deep into her essence, its serrated edges killing her piece by piece.

I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart — the best brain.

World Peace Day is envisioned to become a moment of global unity - it is up to each and every one of us to make this a reality.

Harebrained schemes often lead to great discoveries.

Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis; nor has it any set doctrines which are imposed on its followers for acceptance.

That I survived the Holocaust and went on to love beautiful girls, to talk, to write, to have toast and tea and live my life - that is what is abnormal.

There is no mind so weak and powerless as not to have its inclinations, and none so guarded as to be without its prepossessions.

…You don’t want the best of times to be just one thing, forever. You have to have a lot of bests of times, each one topping the last. You know?

Problems are messages.

I prefer to think of faith, as Coleridge says of poetry, not as the taking up of belief but as "the willing suspension of disbelief". . . a willingness to be open, to explore, to investigate.