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

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.

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

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 have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.