The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.

We are used to the actions of human beings, not to their stillness.

It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.

I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.

Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.

The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.

Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.