I can't persuade myself that one of the problems facing the planet today might be a shortage of books by me.

Everybody's weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it's a sexual thing and sometimes it's a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody's nuts.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

I think persistence in the face of adversity is an essential part of a writer’s job description. If you don’t care enough about it to avoid being easily disheartened that way, you really should be doing something else.

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

It's the easiest thing in the world to know God's will. You just wait and see what happens, and that's it.

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.