She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

I said that when I looked at photographs of the firefighters who went into the Twin Towers, their faces looked to me like Irish faces. I hadn't yet learnt how careful outsiders have to be when talking about race in America, and I'd put my foot in it. Someone stood up and said aggressively, 'What do you mean by Irish faces?'

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.