Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing.

I'm not recognised that much. I'm just a bald man in glasses and there's a rash of them in Dublin. It'd be different if I had a mohican.

You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

It's a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it is a dreary little dump most of the time.

I see people in terms of dialogue and I believe that people are their talk.

Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal.

Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.

It's great meeting children because you never know what they will say.

School has become the world religion of a modernized proletariat, and makes futile promises of salvation to the poor of the technological age.

If we don’t make our own future, it will be made for us.

I looked up fairness in the dictionary and it was not there.

Magic obeys only the heart of the one who uses it. Your magic would always be a kind magic, because you are kind, I can tell. Please stay and help us.

When it comes to competing with the best and brightest in whatever your talents or educational skills are, you have to have the confidence within yourself that you are able to achieve.

I can't see this world unless I go/ outside my southern comfort zone.

Kiss me, and smile for me, tell me that you'll wait for me. Hold me like you'll never let me go.

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others.

I am a Muslim and . . . my religion makes me be against all forms of racism. It keeps me from judging any man by the color of his skin. It teaches me to judge him by his deeds .

It is psychological law that whatever we desire to accomplish we must impress upon the subjective or subconscious mind.