The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Two things are terrible in childhood: helplessness (being in other people's power) and apprehension - the apprehension that something is being concealed from us because it is too bad to be told.

I know that I have in my make-up layers of synthetic experiences, and that the most powerful of my memories are only half true.

Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland.

Ghosts seem harder to please than we are; it is as though they haunted for haunting’s sake -- much as we relive, brood, and smoulder over our pasts.

No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.

writers do not find subjects: subjects find them. There is not so much a search as a state of open susceptibility.