New York is an ugly city, a dirty city... But there is one thing about it. Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.

If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.

I don't plan an awful lot in life just as I don't plan an awful lot in my fiction.

Ideas come to people who are receptive to them.

Why on earth should I care whether people read me with their eyes or their ears?

My mother's father was from Sligo, and he used to say it was the hardest thing in the world to find a man alive in Dublin who wasn't in the GPO during the Easter Rising. Twenty brave men marched into that post office, he said, and thirty thousand marched out.

As my late mother famously observed, the one thing to be said for growing old is that every year there are a few more things I don’t have to give a rat’s ass about.