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.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.

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

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

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