When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.

But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.

When you're too close to people, when you spend too much time with them and love them too dearly, sometimes you can't see them

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

When I was acting, I got trained in creating a character as a three-dimensional person. If you're doing it right you should be able to draw an audience into the character's world and make them feel their fears.

My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.

I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart's desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of long-sightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.