I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.

My favorite optimist was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window washers heard him say, 'So Far, so good.'

When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody.

We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.

When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.

Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.

The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.

Days that lift us like a wave, when you feel you could live forever.

The harder they fall, the harder they become.

Oh! my friend, never seek to corrupt the person whom you love, it can go further than you think...

An image pops into my head of Gabriel Storm in my bed, his golden skin sheened with sweat while I ride him to paradise. Oh. My. God. Where did that come from? I’ve sworn to stay away from men.

It is time for the world, the hemisphere and the region to make sure that relevant institutions of civil society and relevant laws are embedded in the mechanisms of governance.

The time comes in life when we have read enough. It's time to stop reading. It's time to lay down the books and write.

The goalie is like the guy on the minefield. He discovers the mines and destroys them. If you make a mistake, somebody gets blown up.

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live.

It's hard for me to put my feelings into words.

I'm an engineer and a writer. And I find that those two things are not uncomplementary.