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

Silences can be as different as sounds.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

Expectations are the most perilous form of dream, and when dreams do realise themselves it is in the waking world: the difference is subtly but often painfully felt.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

... it appears to me that problems, inherent in any writing, loom unduly large when one looks ahead. Though nothing is easy, little is quite impossible.

The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.