If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.

Autumn arrives in early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

Mechanical difficulties with language are the outcome of internal difficulties with thought.

The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet - when they do meet, their victims lie strewn all round.

Education is not so important as people think.

Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself. In fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience.

It is not helpful to help a friend by putting coins in his pockets when he has got holes in his pockets.

Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.

No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.

The heart may think it knows better: the senses know that absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends.

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

When you love someone all your saved up wishes start coming out.

Silences have a climax, when you have got to speak.

We are minor in everything but our passions.

Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.

Meeting people unlike oneself does not enlarge one's outlook; it only confirms one's idea that one is unique.

I think the main thing, don't you, is to keep the show on the road.

If you look at life one way, there is always cause for alarm.

Pity the selfishness of lovers: it is brief, a forlorn hope; it is impossible.

There is no end to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

Nothing can happen nowhere. The locale of the happening always colours the happening, and often, to a degree, shapes it.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

If a theme or idea is too near the surface, the novel becomes simply a tract illustrating an idea.

The best that an individual can do is to concentrate on what he or she can do, in the course of a burning effort to do it better.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Never to lie is to have no lock on your door, you are never wholly alone.

The wish to lead out one's lover must be a tribal feeling; the wish to be seen as loved is part of one's self-respect.

That is partly why women marry - to keep up the fiction of being in the hub of things.

One can live in the shadow of an idea without grasping it.

Nobody speaks the truth when there is something they must have.

Who is ever adequate? We all create situations each other can't live up to, then break our hearts at them because they don't.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted; when you find it taken for granted, you are unnerved.

Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

Autumn arrives in the early morning, but spring at the close of a winter day.

All your youth you want to have your greatness taken for granted when you find it taken for granted you are unnerved.

The charm one might say the genius of memory is that it is choosy chancy and temperamental it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside chewing a hunk of melon in the dust.

The craft of the novelist does lie first of all in story telling.

Dialogue in fiction is what characters do to one another.

Dialogue should show the relationships among people.

All good dialogue perhaps deals with something unprecedented.

Dialogue should convey a sense of spontaneity but eliminate the repetitiveness of real talk.

Disappointment tears the bearable film of life.

It is not our exalted feelings it is our sentiments that build the necessary home.

Autumn arrives in the early morning but spring at the close of a winter day.