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

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.

Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.