The novel is resilient, and so are novelists.

Writing keeps me at my desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one's living from writing sentences. The sentence is the greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

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.

How flat all sounds are at the seaside, flat and yet emphatic, like the sound of gunshots heard at a distance.

I think I'm less the writer than I'm the written.

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

...being alone with him was like being in a room which someone had just violently left