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.

Dangerous thing, giving humanity the knowledge of good and evil. And the capacity to make the wrong choice more often than not.

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

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.

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

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 don't know about the rest of the country but in New York more people have learned anonymity from rent control than ever discovered it in a twelve-step program.