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.

When you get older, keeping the private stuff private seems less important.

I've always essentially been a New Yorker.

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

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.

One aspect of serendipity to bear in mind is that you have to be looking for something in order to find something else.

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.