It is exciting and emancipating to believe we are one of nature's latest experiments, but what if the experiment is unsuccessful?

The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.

Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.

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.

The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.

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