As a friend of mine, herself a writer, says, 'People who spend the most meaningful hours of their lives in the exclusive company of imaginary people are apt to be a little strange'

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 wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.

Man, I so sick of dinosaurs. They wasn't extinct, I'd go out an' kill 'em myself.

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.

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

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.