It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.

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

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

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.

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

Well, youth is the period of assumed personalities and disguises. It is the time of the sincerely insincere.

Criticism changes with the fashion of the time. A story is always a story.