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

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

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

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.

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.