I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

Back then, before it became clear that democracy was best served by a drunken electorate, the bars in New York City were required to close on Election Day.

Booze and tobacco and lots of sex. It keeps a lad young.

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

I haven't got anything against cats. I haven't got anything against elk either, but that doesn't mean I'm going to keep one in the store so I'll have a place to hang my hat.

Serendipity. Look for something, find something else, and realize that what you've found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for.

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.