For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.

Ideally I'd like to spend two evenings a week talking to Proust and another conversing with the Holy Ghost.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.