You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Everything we do is tinged with the knowledge that this may be the last time that we will do this, and that makes what we're doing incredibly sweet.

We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations.

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

A man is not much if he can't depend on himself, and nothing if others can't depend on him.

If you think about something else hard enough, you can mostly control your feelings.

Myth: US housing market is in recovery. Fact: Big banks have been hiding their bloated home inventory, seized by virtue of home foreclosures.

I usually shop at Charlotte Ruth and Bebe.

A true friend is the most precious of all possessions and the one we take the least thought about acquiring.

One must know how to conserve oneself- the best test of independence.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

I would never repudiate the fact that I am an Irishman

A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.

Im pretty adept with computers and Photoshop for my blog, and I found my style with a conversational voice and an image-ready column.

Good parenting give headaches but bad parenting gives heartaches.