I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

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

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

All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

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.

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