The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one.

People don't get to change things. Things change people once in a while, but people don't change things.

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.

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.

When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.

Every year there's a few more things I'm not sure of. I've decided that a wide-ranging uncertainty is the mark of the true maturity of man.

And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.