"County Clare inhabits my thoughts and my writing wherever I happen to be. Ireland is always speaking a story and I have to search for it. (Is it always familiar territory?) O'BRIEN: Yes and no. With each book I hope to dig deeper. That is all I ask."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) “Old Wounds,” by Edna O’Brien, haunts me as though I’ve lived it."

"There's nothing like obstacle to make a writer"

"On Being Old. It's not nice but take comfort that you won't stay that way for ever."

"Smell weakness and they close in all at once."

"When we're young, we leave home and we think we're leaving behind us our roots. And we do leave them behind for a time. And then they catch up with us, and they twine themselves around us and that's a great thing."

"If you shoot off a chap's kneecaps I hardly think there is point in putting bullets in his liver."

"I believe in Kafka's maxim that literature, whether it be poetry or prose, is disturbing. It's many other things as well- it can be exciting; it can be an ecstasy; it can be, to use a modern word, it can be a trip. But the inner core of human existence is about disturbance and writing comes from conflict."

"I don't think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it's like a dance I couldn't learn."

"Writing of any experience, male or female, is difficult. One has to keep one's eyes and ears open and then delve into the imagination."

"[A novel] has a right and a duty to ask very painful and difficult questions. It doesn't solve them, but it asks them. (1995)"

"Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. (Vogue, April 1985)"

"I never write about simple, gentle things, and I never will. It's not being sensational. I hate sensational books. Unless we look at dark and covered painful wounds, we can never heal them. (1995)"

"It is not that you have to be happy-that would be asking too much-but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it the generosity so necessary to create. (1984)"

"To make a story both more alive and more suspenseful one has to think of altering the point of view of each chapter. In doing that one changes styles because each person thinks differently. I find it stimulating though a little daunting, but as reader and writer I am not interested in anything less."

"Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty."

"She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give."

"It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence."

"All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people."

"[On the banning of (her then) four novels in Ireland] I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing. We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it's by abrasion that people's prejudices are aroused."

"That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open."

"(Do think of your work as political?) O'BRIEN: Well, everything is political: one's upbringing, the culture in which one grows up, even religion is political, whether we like it or not. Religion is supposed to be spiritual but we all know it isn't."

"Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more."

"Bash on regardless. That is the cry dear chap. Through the funerals of friends. Trampling the rose gardens of enemies. Bash on regardless."

"I waked quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I awaken easily, and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason: he had not come home, my father."

"To a blonde tweedy lady I had to administer a few I beg your pardons before she would await her turn. When a red nosed tinkerish looking Jarvey with a rather scrawny mare pulled up. In my most gentlemanly fashion I ushered these three older country people just behind to proceed ahead of me. But they nodded in eight directions and looked up at the sky in four more as if asking every saint in heaven for assistance and then urged me with their country voices to take the horsecab. "Ah, it's soon enough later for the likes of us.""

"My god, one can see such a different side of people when one's merely a menial. O God what utter amazing ruddy bliss to no longer be a menial."

"We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable."

"Of the eighty thousand things that came all at once into my mind to say, I selected the one hundred and twelfth."

"But damn it all, aren't we just as some great playwright or someone said, actors on a stage."

"Even if everybody suffers, your own suffering does not seem less."

""Why don't you shut up. You thief." Amazing how few words one has to use to gain one's desired effect."

"Foxy said it was always good to use the word fucking in your threats. Then they always fucking well knew. That you Fucking well Meant it"

"(Do you have to cultivate a distance between you and your friends to have space to write?) O'BRIEN: Yes. One must live the inner life to the utmost. Samuel Beckett wrote a preface to a book of Jack Yeats's paintings, and he said: "the artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere. And he has no brothers." Well, of course, he does come from somewhere and that somewhere informs and permeates the work as it did for Samuel Beckett and it did for Jack Yeats, but solitary is how an artist has to be. It's crucial to the work. And painful for the life!"

"Darcy Dancer crossing the frosty cobbles of the farmyard. Snorts and stampings in the stables. The whinnies of Molly and Petunia. Who smell me near. Luke mucking out. Forking up the big brown lumps of dung matted with yellow straw and shovelling it into his barrow. At least someone is working. But I suppose I shall have to spout a few hackneyed words to pass the time of day. "Good morning to you sir. It's grand to see you up and about." "Thank you Luke. It's a chilly draughty old morning." "'Tis that sir." "Gives one a mind to thank god for inventing fire." "Ah now you've said it, sir. On these winter days you need the little bit of hell the Lord puts flaming in a grate.""

"I think I am at a cross roads. And which way I turn may indeed be the direction of my whole destiny." "Ah you are far too young to speak so. Life it comes. Bang. It knocks you a little this way. Bang. It knock you a little bit the other way. And the direction you go. Well you are lucky if it is not backwards." "Or bang, it could madam, flatten one altogether." "Yes, it does do that too. But then we must get up again."

"The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed."

"But like the end of every rainbow I ran to with my sisters, all I ever found was misty rain drops."

"A pity to meet kindness. Lower one's guard. And wham."

"A tall scholar rushes up the steps to the lectern and Latins out grace. Beseated. A great clatter of shifting chairs. The carvers stand at their long tables sharpening knives. The great joints heaved up on their platters at the serving hatch. Thin harassed faces of these little women stared out across the dark gowned gathering. To catch their breath and go plunging back down again deep into the bowels of this dungeon kitchen. The clank of cutlery. The passing of the jug of beer. Light refreshing ale, a gift from a prosperous brewer."

"Love and affection calms the horse. Provided you can administer these before you are bitten, trampled or kicked to death. Meanwhile step back out of harm's way. Murmur quiet peaceful words. There, there now. Easy there. Quietly now. Good old fellow."

"'Sorry, we gave you a wrong life,' they said not too apologetically. 'Will you begin anew?'"

"Caliban fights the Taliban"

"Once a century the world is divided into before and after."

"The century has started with the crime of the century."

"...nothing else left but to watch eternity breaking up into human splinters."

"Leviathan learning to overcome time"

"Europe is shrinking, but America is broadening."

"The bigger the house, the smaller the occupants."

"Polluters of void."