The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.

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.

Submit, Submit.

All I know, all I can comprehend of the mathematics of a life, are the times your hand is inside my hand, and the times it is not.

Silence is not the absence of sound, but the absence of self.

There was a time when He was not.

He lost himself in the words and images conjured in his mind and for a while forgot ... He found himself flying among stars and planets.

If the lion didn't bite the tamer every once in a while, it wouldn't be exciting.

Woody makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic, or political.

Through patience and certainty, leadership in the religion is obtained.

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.

The modern research laboratory can be a large and complicated social organism.