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.

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.

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 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.

Until you begin to write, then you shall know the wonders of the written word.

Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.

All who call on God in true faith earnestly from the heart will certainly be heard and will receive what they have asked and desired.

I can take it. The tougher it gets, the cooler I get.

When we become hollow bones there is no limit to what the Higher Powers can do in and through us in spiritual things.

It's a marriage. If I had to choose between my wife and my putter, well, I'd miss her.

I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year. Scout

And on Thursday, President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly criticize the 'terrible deeds' . . . committed 'in the name of Christ.'.

In many biological structures proteins are simply components of larger molecular machines.

Whoever said a horse was dumb, was dumb