If fate sends you a lemon, use it to make lemonade.

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

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

To say I drank my way into marriage isn't much of an exaggeration, and it's none at all to say I drank my way out of it.

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.

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.

I've always essentially been a New Yorker.