"Looking back, I can now see that Hood is part of a small but interesting body of lesbian novels of loss and bereavement (by people like Sarah Schulman, Marion Douglas, Sarah Von Arsdale, Carol Anshaw) written in the 1990s. We were catching up with the boys, perhaps; gay men really took the lead in writing honest and beautiful books about mourning."

"Are stories true?" "Which ones?" "The mermaid mother and Hansel and Gretel and all them." "Well," says Ma, "not literally." "What's—" "They're magic, they're not about real people walking around today." "So they're fake?" "No, no. Stories are a different kind of true."

"When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I'm five I know everything."

"Scared is what you're feeling," says Ma, "but brave is what you're doing."

"There is something of the eternally mischievous child about Healy, though he approaches the art of writing with all the seriousness of a religious vocation."

"He plays a game of his own, where different rules apply, and yet he commands his place. When you read his work, you have to adjust the straight line of the hierarchy just to fit him in."

"Does Ms Battersby look at the photograph of Dermot Healy and say: This is an old man's effort not fashionable like Neil Jordan's so I'll disembowel him because that's how I feel today? We were all privileged to read Ms Battersby's ghost story in The Irish Times Magazine a few months ago. It was a revelation. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it was the worst piece of creative writing I have ever read in a long life of reading. Truly. Stunningly bad. I have used it in a workshop as an example of how to avoid writing “Shite and onions”. That this person has the temerity to sit in negative judgment on one of the great masters of Irish writing should not pass without comment."

"The writer's writer"

"Ireland's finest living novelist"

"A Celtic Hemingway"

"I like the idea of stopping mid-sentence, like Graham Greene."

"I'm no good at dinner parties. I feel very uneasy at them."

"The heir of Patrick Kavanagh"

"Probably the finest memoir … written in Ireland in the last 50 years"

"I often find poems hand written in old abandoned notebooks."

"I'm always fascinated by etymology."

"I know writing is what I do but I still don't see myself as one."

"There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer – reading is so much a part of it."

"I rang up this publisher and they asked me what I was doing at the time. I told them I was a house-painter, so first of all they had me come round and paint the place. Only later did they consider my work and Banished Misfortune was published."

"[Kafka] taught me a lot about the normal and the abnormal, and the distance between them. [...] He's out there by himself. You get the jump in the feet when you read certain passages by him. That's the mark of truly great writing. It gives you the jump in the feet."

"The Bible has entered much of my work as have Latin and Greek mythology and verse."

"Without the reader there would be no writer."

"It is a costly thing living here to fight the erosion. The sea is constantly threatening to cut into the coastline and sweep all this away. Every year we have to haul stones up here to repair the damage and plug the holes. It's a full-time job."

"The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. (I went away while all this was happening.) The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope it is, although I often made a bid to escape. I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up."

"When I was a professor at the University of Austin in Texas, it had such a luxurious swimming–pool that one end had a raised ledge in the water specifically so you could drag a deckchair in and lie on it and read. But the problem is that the students are all so young and the thing with Americans is that when they're fit, they are so fit. So you feel like someone's granny pottering about in the slow lane."

"Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them . . . a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round. Boys like me, aged 15 -- if one of them had . . . yeah, it would have been absolutely no problem for me aged 15. It didn't happen, but it wouldn't have been a problem."

"I was the worst barman who ever lived. My pints of Guinness were unholy."

"If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away."

"I was brought up in a house where there was a great deal of silence."

"I have a rule that I don't drink in New York because I don't want to wake up with a hangover and not be able to work."

"Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly."

"I went to a friend who's a girl and asked her, 'What's it like to have sex for the first time, if you're Irish – so you're modest, and it's the 1950s – so you've never seen it in a film?' I listened carefully to what she said, and I put it in the book. It was an important element, the detail was richly memorable for the person, it had to be in the book."

"A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country."

"The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych.""

"I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure."

"She rearranged a whole wall of books so it was completely full of Irish writers. She didn't look like she was any trouble so no one caught her."

"She had time for everybody. Perhaps because her stories came from all of us and for all of us."

"She had that great gift of making you feel life was worth living. A very, very special person."

"I often wonder that if I had met Hitler, I reckon I might have found some streak of decency in him."

"I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance."

"On my 100th birthday, piloting Gordon and myself into the side of a mountain."

"She was charming, intelligent, warm, generous in her time, with her effort, with her work. I just had the greatest of respect for her because she suffered badly from arthritis, and she had a lot of pain, and she never complained, you know."

"It's like if you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either."

"I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare', I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning', I say I 'passed a school'. You don't wear all your jewellery at once. You're much more believable if you talk in your own voice."

"(A) writer, a man I loved and he loved me and we got married and it was great and is still great. He believed I could do anything, just as my parents had believed all those years ago, and I started to write fiction and that took off fine. And he loved Ireland, and the fax was invented so we writers could live anywhere we liked, instead of living in London near publishers."

"Suddenly they asked me, as only the French would, ‘Madame, what is your philosophy of life?’ What a cosmic question, but I had to answer, and answer quickly, because it was live. So I said, in French, ‘I think that you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt and stop wishing for another hand.’"

"I write exactly as I speak, so therefore I would not say any writer influenced me at all."

"O wretched is the dame, to whom the sound, "Your lord will soon return," no pleasure brings."

"'Tis well to be merry and wise, 'Tis well to be honest and true; 'Tis well to be off with the old love, Before you are on with the new."

"A malady Preys on my heart that med'cine cannot reach."