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

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

Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.

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.

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

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

fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.