I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. The friend becomes a traitor by breaking, however unwillingly or sadly, out of our own zone: a hard judgment is passed on him, for all the pleas of the heart.

Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.

... love dreads being isolated, being left to speak in a void -- at the beginning it would often rather listen than speak.

Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold.