I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.

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.

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

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 more anger towards the past you carry in your heart, the less capable you are of loving in the present.

Every pitcher can beat you, it doesn't matter how good you are.

You mean guys don't get injured in spring training? Guys get hurt walking down the street.

I wrapped that Monday and started on my third episode for Miss Match on Thursday of that same week and we just wrapped yesterday cause it was split over the holiday.

A true friend encourages us, comforts us, supports us like a big easy chair, offering us a safe refuge from the world.

I never followed baseball very much. As a kid, I never followed sports.

I am as comfortless as a pilgrim with peas in his shoes - and as cold as Charity, Chastity or any other Virtue.

When I first moved to New York I wanted to be a dancer, I danced professionally for years, living a hand-to-mouth existence.

Wear your boots if you wander today

Sometimes when you cut your bed tracks right off the bat, you don't really know where the vocal is landing and where the background vocals are, and other loops and stuff that are going on.