"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."

"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."

"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."

""Bitter?" said the barmaid and he nodded. What a strange thing to call a drink. Bitter. Aloes. Sorrow. For something that was supposed to make you feel happy."

"What we run here, Brother, is a finishing school for the sons of the Idle Poor." "It finishes them all right."

"I always say that a man with one language is like a man with one eye."

"They are angry men with vision, Brother, and by God their anger is justified. Ireland has not much longer to suffer. Her misery will soon be over and we'll be a united country again." "Yes," said Brother Sebastian, "but I don't like their methods." "Nor do I, Brother. Nor do I. But do you like the methods of the British Government any better?"

"A bird's-eye view does not see the truth."

"If you have a war on your hands you send for the Mr Crillys of this world. The hard men and the bandits are the real revolutionaries, if you see what I mean. They get things done, they punch the hole for us to get through later."

"Do you still want to - refuse to help?" "I'm afraid so." "Not to act - you know - is to act. By not doing anything you are helping to keep the Brits here."

""Once you've been through a tragedy you're scared of it ever after," Mrs Morton said."

"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."

"It was a way of not thinking - to concentrate on her surroundings. If she stared at things, then it helped block out stuff."

"When they had come recruiting to his school - 'for fishers of men' - all those years ago and had offered the glittering lures of sanctity and safety, Michael had jumped selflessly. It was a long time before the line pulled taut and he felt the pain of the hooks within him and the irony of the fisherman caught."

"Love is a very strange idea. I never know what it is. When you were young it seemed to be all intensity and no opportunity. Later when you did get the opportunity the fire had gone out of it."

"Purring was the funniest thing, like a motorbike in the distance."

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

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

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

"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 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."

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

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

"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."

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

"A Celtic Hemingway"

"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 heir of Patrick Kavanagh"

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

"Ireland's finest living novelist"

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

"Without the reader there would be no writer."

"The writer's writer"

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

"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."

"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."

"You always think that if you're going to spend seven years on a book, it should be Gravity's Rainbow or Ulysses or something, but mine is just a 200-page book that took a long time."

"[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."

"This is going to sound really childish, but I've been intrigued by Romania ever since the 1976 Olympics, when Nadia Comăneci, the little gymnast, scored a perfect 10. And I thought any country that gave that to the world had to be wonderful, so I read up a lot on it. When the 1989 revolutions broke out, I remember cheering them on. They were the last ones to make a bid for freedom, and it was the bloodiest and the most spectacular of the revolutions. It was almost French in its drama, like the French Revolution."

"I nearly went fucking crazy crazy. Notes [from a Coma] marked a sort of natural breakdown with Jonathan Cape. The book got a good critical response but it didn't too well. So publishers look at you then and think, okay, he writes good books but . . . If you have that experimental twist, you make things hard for yourself. So for those five years, I couldn't give my work away. It was tough on me and for people around me. But as my wife Maeve said to me, it isn't my job to get published . . . it is my job to write."

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

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

"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."

"I'm always fascinated by etymology."

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

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

"The ‘novel’ is a publishing convention that deforms the story. If more attention were given to form there would be fewer novels and better stories. There's no reason a publisher can’t put out a story that's a hundred or even seventy pages long. But a publisher will look at a story like that as defective novel, ineligible for shortlists. It should be in a collection. Or pumped full of air, turned into a novel… It's a pity. You see some good writers behaving like performing monkeys."