You have to be lonely to be a writer

Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

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.

never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.

It was the first time that I came face to face with madness and feared it and was fascinated by it.

What matters is the imaginative truth.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.