Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

What’s old doesn’t need to be old-fashioned. It gets reborn.

A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time.

Freaky things happen all the time in the world. I suppose everything has to happen for the first time at some point.

This is why you can never reason true Christians out of the faith. It's not, as the adage has it, because they were never reasoned into it - many were - it's that faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping.

Ireland starts for me with the end of The Dead, which my father read to me from his desk in his basement office in New Albany, Ind.

I think empathy is a guy who punches you in the face at a bus station, and you're somehow able to look at that him and know enough about what situation he was in to know that he had to do that and not to hit back. That's empathy, and nothing ever happens in writing that has that kind of moral heroism about it.