When you grow up on an island, what matters is how you stand to the sea.

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.

She was beautiful, but her youth, the very awkwardness of her age, prevented her from flaunting it.

I'm a huge fan of Steve Martin. He's hilarious, but he has this depth to him and this way of dealing with the difficult things in life with a sense of humor that I think has helped me as an actress.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

A leader's most valuable asset is not their time but their energy and ability to energize others.

I have little feet because nothing grows in the shade.

The love of study, a passion which derives fresh vigor from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure.

If you're talking triple threat of a writer, singer and actress, that would probably be Beyoncé. If Aaliyah were still here, she and Beyoncé would be neck and neck.

The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.

I love a book that makes me ask questions about what I think or how I see the world or how I feel, so I hope that 'Goodbye, Stranger' is that kind of book for some people.

When I breathe, This sound in my chest Lonelier than the winter wind