Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.

The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful...

I suppose I did feel a certain public pressure always.

Publication is rather like pushing the boat out; then the boat/book turns into a melting ice floe and you have to conjure a second boat which again turns into a melting floe under your feet. All the stepping stones that you conjure disappear under the water behind you.

But even so, none of the news of these world-spasms entered me as terror.

When I was teaching, I gave a lot of my mind and anxiety to it. There was always something clenched and anxious in me until the classes were over.

But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possibilities would have to be based.