Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.

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.

You need a strategy to assume leadership, but only the character can sustain leaders as who they really are.

Those who are called by God are predestined for victory

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

Doubt is the vestibule of faith.

On a movie, you have a great time, and you're really enjoying the work, and then everybody is done and goes their separate ways, and you maybe never get to work with those people again.

Our Lord never condemned the fig tree because it brought forth so much fruit that some fell to the ground and spoiled. He only cursed it when it was barren.

by the mercy of God all the ideas of youth are reversible!

There are. intangible realities which float near us, formless and without words; realities which no one has thought out, and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.

I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.

Every time you think a negative thought, it's one step in the wrong direction, for me.