Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

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.

Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.

The law, instead of cleansing the heart from sin, doth revive it, put strength into, and increase it in the soul, even as it doth discover and forbid it, for it doth not give power to subdue.

I have never seen a peaceful environment better than libraries

Nature's beauty we all admire in every shape and form, but how much more we admire her when the weather's nice and warm.

To the Japanese, Portugal and Russia are neutral enemies, England and America are belligerent enemies, and Germany and her satellites are friendly enemies. They draw very fine distinctions.

I'm interested in utopian communities of the past. Many of them didn't survive and I'm examining closely the reasons they failed.

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

Science is science, but a girl MUST get her hair done.

I remember looking at the sky and thinking that the universe is so big and it's all chaos. I call it 'the dark fear.' At any moment, the dark fear could come in.

In high school I definitely had a clique of friends. And what I loved about it was that we were healthy and good girls.