Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.

Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.

There are some places you love with your heart, and there are some places that you love with your mind- the places that you love with both are called 'libraries'

Every pain is a lesson.

Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.

The one joy that has kept me going through life has been the fact that stories unite us. To see you as you listen to me now, as you have always listened to me, is to know this: what I can believe, you can believe. And the way we all see our story-not just as Irish people but as flesh and blood individuals and not the way people tell us to see it-that's what we own, no matter who we are and where we come from.

As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.