Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

Later as the day cools and they have gone in, the cry of the corncrake will carry across those same fields and over the lake to the blue-hazed mountain, such a lonely evening sound to it, like the lonely evening sound of the mothers, saying it is not our fault that we weep so, it is nature's fault that makes us first full, then empty.