Dogs are dim creatures, do not speak to me of their good sense--have you ever heard of a team of tomcats hauling a sled across the frozen wastes?

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.

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

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

I don't make a distinction between men and women. To me they are just people.

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