You have to be lonely to be a writer

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.

...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

When you fall in love, it is spring no matter when. Leaves falling make no difference, they are from another season.

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.