I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

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.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

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

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

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin