I live in Dublin, God knows why. There are greatly more congenial places I could have settled in - Italy, France, Manhattan - but I like the climate here, and Irish light seems to be essential for me and for my writing.

Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don't do well, in the hope of learning.

The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.

Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long indian summer, a state of tranquility, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of childhood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, toward the final, almost unnoticed, quietus.

With the crime novels, its delightful to have protagonists I can revisit in book after book. Its like having a fictitious family.

I never went to university. I'm self-educated. I didn't go because I was too impatient, too arrogant.

There are times, they occur with increasing frequency nowadays, when I seem to know nothing, when everything I know seems to have fallen out of my mind like a shower of rain, and I am gripped for a moment in paralysed dismay, waiting for it all to come back but with no certainty that it will.