I would be far more critical than any reviewer could be of my own work. So I simply don't read them.

I like ideas. I find them more exciting than human behavior for the most part.

For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.

In order really to write one has to sink deep into the self and become lost there.

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

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.

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.