Most working days I can be at my desk for nine hours a day.

I'm not recognised that much. I'm just a bald man in glasses and there's a rash of them in Dublin. It'd be different if I had a mohican.

Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.

I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.

When I was a kid, if you didn't speak Irish, you really wanted to. And you played Gaelic games and you didn't pay any attention to what was happening in the outside world, because really, the - Ireland was the center of the universe. And I don't think that's the case anymore, although, admittedly, it is the center of the universe.

If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing.

Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.