Novelists From Ireland

""The individual matters," said Mrs Gallagher."

"INTERVIEWER: (After an awkward silence) And how do you see the future? PROFUNDO: I wait for it to come and then look at it (laughs)."

"I come from the kind of house where if my father saw me with a book in my hand he'd say, "Can you not find something better to do?""

"It concentrates the mind wonderfully knowing that this [life] is all we can expect."

"Neil offered his arm as she lowered herself from the step to the ground. "What a polite young man." "That's my mother's fault.""

""Four pounds?" Still the woman hesitated. "Any less and it'd be a favour," he said. Already he was out of pocket. He stood up to end the bargaining."

"Believers. I mean, where have they all gone?"

"Sit down, son, don't loom."

"You can't choose your children."

"Stella was telling the clerk that there was a Catholic church in the heart of the red-light district called 'Our Dear Lord in the Attic'. "Would there be Mass there?" "No, I do not think so." The clerk shook his head. "It is now a museum." "All religion should be in museums," Gerry said."

"The coffee was good and the first sip made him want a cigarette. His hand went to his pocket before he realised it was decades since he'd had a smoke. The desire came out of nowhere. He thought how foolish, how stuck in routine the body becomes. Would the same thing happen if he tried to give up drinking?"

"On the wall above the sink was a board, with tools clipped to it. A hammer, screwdrivers - a pair of pliers, a hacksaw. And other stuff. Each item was outlined carefully in red paint. "I like your board arrangement," said Stella. "It's to remind me to put things back. If I don't, the empty ghost yells at me. So I put things back.""

"What happened to you? You're nothing but appetite."

"He succeeded in persuading her back to look at The Jewish Bride. There was a crowd gathered around it. It was huge, big as a hoarding, a great slash of browns and yellows and reds. Two figures, a man and a woman on the edge of intimacy, or perhaps just after, about to coorie in to one another. Hands. Hands everywhere. A painting about touch. Stella joined the crowd and wormed her way to the front. Gerry watched her bite her lip as she gazed. She became aware of Gerry watching her. He excused himself and threaded his way to her side. "Well?" "There's a great tenderness in him," she said. "You can see he cherishes her." "Look at that big hand of his," Gerry said. "And the sleeve. Like a big croissant. The way he's put the paint on." "And the faces," she said. "But she's not so sure. Shy, yes. Sure, no. What sumptuous clothes." She pointed out the groom's hand around the woman's shoulder and his other hand resting on her breast. The bride's touch of the groom's hand."

"You know how vivid things are in extremis. There's something going on in the brain. Chemicals. They make the moment indelible.""

"Stella found herself isolating one particular snowflake - a small one - and watching its progress. Lifting, floating, eddying upwards, sinking among the others. Dithering. Then when it went off her radar she would choose another and watch it and will it to survive for as long as possible."

"There's not much you can do in this world without people getting to know."

"The island kids had TV, radio. Their remote surroundings were seen as a deprivation, not something to be enjoyed. They felt cut off from the mainstream. To be on an island was a source of discontent, not as good as the mainland."

"You sit down to your desk and listen to what's inside your head. Things appear suddenly and unexpectedly. I don't mean it's like inspiration or anything like that but, put it this way, you are there with a 3B pencil in your hand should you hear anything good. If you are in a notion of working, the idea takes root and won't let you go. It puts out twigs and branches. These twigs get leaves and thorns and maybe, if you are lucky, blossoms. And fruit. [...] The worst thing that can happen at a time like this is an interruption. When the interruption is over it's very hard to get the same momentum going again."

"In a Portstewart guest house her father liked to play tricks when he had eaten his egg. He would put the shell upside down in someone else's eggcup. The McKennas would sit and watch the next person lift a spoon and cave in the top of the hollow egg."

"She smiled to prove everything was all right. It was an odd device, this rearrangement of muscles of the face which said everything is all right. No need to enquire within. It could be used as a barrier to fend off emotional intruders."

"When she met men the first things she took account of were the negative things. Wimpishness, a bully, shiftiness, recklessness, elaborate facial hair."

"How can something be utterly simple and amazingly complex at the same time? Things are simple or complex according to how much attention is paid to them."

"I wish I was artistic," said Liz, "then I could be temperamental."

"An earthquake in one department created tidal waves in others."

"On a slippery slope the only way was down."

"Look, see, behold. Above all, listen."

"Now that they had mobile phones, theoretically it should have been easier to keep tabs on one another. But practically it had not helped. In the first instance you had to remember to bring the bloody thing with you. If you had it with you, invariably one or other of the mobiles was switched off or needed charging. And then, even if you did get through, Stella's phone had some mysterious setting which diverted incoming calls straight to 'Leave a message'. And her phone did not ring. And she did not answer it."

"When they finally got into the foyer there were some enlarged black and white photographs. Anne in her school playground before the war. Anne in the street with friends. Anne at a desk, writing."

"She rummaged in her bag and produced a postcard she'd bought in the museum shop. Old Woman Reading. It was not the painting she had seen but a different one. When she'd asked for the postcard the assistant had shrugged and said they were out of it. There are many old women reading, she said. The assistant had offered her another, even better, card. An old woman, cowled in some dark material, looking down at a book. It was so lovely - the concentration in the eyes, the luminescence of the ancient face reflected from the page, the interior light from reading whatever was printed there."

"They crossed a metal suspension bridge over a canal. Both sides of the structure bristled with padlocks. Some of the brass locks had felt-tipped names written on them. 'Don + Gwen', 'Micky & Minnie', 'Leo n Leonora'. One had a message written on it. 'Graham and Vickey. I love you more than Coco Pops.' "It must be some kind of love fest," Gerry said. "Clamped for ever." "Have you seen this kinda thing before?" "I've heard of it." "It'll be the young ones." "Trendy ones.""

"A thing that really took his breath away was Norman Foster's roof over the Great Court at the British Museum - the audacity and brilliance of it. The approach inside the building from a periphery of darkness into the thrilling light at its centre - the largest covered square in Europe - was utterly wonderful."

"Steady as a three-legged stool."

"A summer insect flew into the metal dome of the Anglepoise and knocked around like a tiny knuckle."

"When she emptied the kettle she always filled it for the benefit of the next person."

"There's nobody can fix this but yourself. You are the only one who can make the changes."

"Sometimes I have difficulty with the avant-garde. There's a gallery in London I've been to and it's difficult to tell what's going on. A bag of nails, a ladder, a hammer - a crisp bag in the corner. Is it an exhibition or are they preparing an exhibition? Is the artist asking me to pay attention to something trivial or important?"

"On the wall above the desk was an ikon he had bought in Thessaloníki - he afterwards discovered that he had paid too much for it. It had been hanging for some months before he noticed, his attention focused by a moment of rare idleness, that Christ had a woodworm hole in the pupil of his left eye. It was inconspicuous by its position, and rather than detracting from the impact, he felt the ikon was enhanced by the authenticity of this small defect."

"Are you a conduit for the music?"

"It's all going far too well," said Gerry. "A bad omen."

""Alcohol is the rubber tyres between me and the pier." He held up his glass to her. They chinked."

"She found a large and classy department store. Like any other city, Amsterdam was full of shops which sold things that nobody wanted. Or the kind of things some people wanted but nobody needed."

"Since Belfast, he always sat in a chair facing the door."

"Everybody's got an opinion about her, haven't they? Even that charmless female Anne Enright couldn't just accept a fat cheque and the Man Booker Prize for her miserable novel about a large family without telling the world, totally gratuitously, that she hated Kate McCann. Her publishers should have put a large brown bag over her head immediately — because to put down someone who is guilty of no crime, except being fit and attractive, is thoroughly repellent. I urge you not to buy Enright's book until she apologises for this slur on another member of the sisterhood."

"There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."

"She should, in my view, make a substantial donation to the Madeleine McCann fund -- perhaps half her Booker prizewinnings of €70,000: she will be a rich woman, in any case... But I doubt she will make any such gesture, because I don't think she quite understands how much damage she has done, not just to Mr and Mrs McCann, but to the vital principle that every individual in a properly-run democracy is innocent until proved guilty. She seems to think that the unfortunate aspect was the "timing" of the piece. No, it was not. It was the substance -- and the effect."

"There was a great buzz and sometimes I felt like awarding myself purple hearts for the work I was doing."

"It was lucky I was hanging around with theatre types who don't really have steady jobs."

"I remember rocking the pram with one hand and typing with the other."

"Others complain that I don’t make the fundamental idea plain enough. This is every writer’s dilemma. Your form is your meaning, and your meaning dictates the form. But what you try to convey is reality—the fact plus the feeling, a total complex experience of a real world. If you make your scheme too explicit, the framework shows and the book dies. If you hide it too thoroughly, the book has no meaning and therefore no form. It is a mess."