No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

Temperamentally, the writer exists on happenings, on contacts, conflicts, action and reaction, speed, pressure, tension. Were he acontemplative purely, he would not write.

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

[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.

Autumn arrives in the early morning.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

The paradox of romantic love -- that what one possesses, one can no longer desire -- was at work.