There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

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.

I did not sleep. I never do when I am over-happy, over-unhappy, or in bed with a strange man.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

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

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.