The best way to reveal a character is to get them to open their mouths.

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.

Harry looked at him and you could see the murder come in his face. ... Harry didn't say anything, but you could see the killing go out of his face and his eyes came open natural again.

If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.

I could live a normal life. My motivation is only to take on new challenges.

I love Christianity, Islam and many other faiths - through Hinduism.

God's existence needs to be established independently before he can be brought into account for causation; it cannot be assumed at the start.

Everything in large doses is gonna kill you. Even happiness.

Art is more than a series of images that are disembodied. Art is objects that live in real places, economies, spaces, architecture.

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus and a chair that's not obtained from Craigslist that keeps poking into his back.

I want to show that the underdog can win. I believe were all the same: you, a slum girl, my mother.

No one can guarantee success in war, but only deserve it.