Wariness had driven away poetry; from hesitating to feel came the moment when you no longer could.

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?

As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with "characters," or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons "in history." History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

Nobody speaks the truth when there's something they must have.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.