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.

I’ve tried writing and the sentences come out fine, but I write a few pages and I don’t want to go on.

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.

One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I'm going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I'll have lost nothing-writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.

Something I learned long ago. It is not necessary to know what a person is afraid of. It is enough to know the person is afraid.

Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.

Stories are like assholes. Everybody's got one and most of 'em stink.