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.

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.

That's one of the many things I hate about life, that it's a hideously cliched business.

The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference.

All I wanted was to be left alone. They abhor a vacuum, other people. You find a quiet corner where you can hunker down in peace, and the next minute there they are, crowding around you in their party hats, tooting their paper whistles in your face and insisting you get up and join in the knees-up.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.