I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

There are fewer and fewer Jews in Ireland, but we still have one of the most famous Jewish characters in literary history, of course, in Leopold Bloom.

Let it be. Silly song, really. You let it be, it returns. There's the truth. You let it be, it drags you to the ground. You let it be, it crawls up your walls.

I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.

The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.