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.

Donald Westlake's Parker novels are among the small number of books I read over and over. Forget all that crap you've been telling yourself about War and Peace and Proust-these are the books you'll want on that desert island.

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.

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.

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

If you build a better mousetrap, Nature will build a better mouse.