It's great people still care about books, and it's great you can still fashion a life from literature.

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.

I'm full of self-doubt. I doubt everything I do. Everything I do is a failure.

Poetry is that magic which consists in awakening sensations with the help of a combination of sounds ... that sorcery by which ideas are necessarily communicated to us, in a definite way, by words which nevertheless do not express them.

Sleep is uncanny, I have always found it so, a nightly dress-rehearsal for being dead.

All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of living; lies are life's almost-anagram.

I've always been fascinated by physics and cosmology. It gets more and more scary the older you get.