The world is more outlandish than some people’s imaginations.

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is raw as a wound. It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once and ultimately achieves the kind of spirit-healing few novels do

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

It was as if we were at the heart of a maze. We were overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks ahead. Mary had given us a bottle of milk and a spoonful of loose tea, and so, unable to decide what to do, we did what all Irish men and women do: we had tea. Suddenly the sun appeared and not for the first or last time we felt it uplifting us and changing everything. It seemed like a holiday.

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

The water is this marvellous blue. It’s so blue that once you see it you realise you’ve never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it’s not blue. This, this is blue. It’s a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea.