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.

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.

... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

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

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.

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