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.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

Karen, her elbows folded on the deck-rail, wanted to share with someone the pleasure in being alone: this is the paradox of any happy solitude. She had never landed at Cork, so this hill and that hill beyond were as unexpected as pictures at which you say "Oh look!" Nobody was beside her to share the moment, which would have been imperfect with anyone else there.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.