Theology, however implausible many of its truth claims, is one of the most ambitious theoretical arenas left in an increasingly specialized world

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

God chose what is weakest in the world to shame the strong.

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.