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

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

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

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

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.