“The privilege is not writing a novel, it's to have someone read it. When you look at it that way, you realize the responsibility you have to put your very best on the page.”

“Personal accounts flow from the heart and tend to be the most difficult to write. It's nearly impossible to remove the emotional undertones, and it takes so much courage to open those pages to everyone else.”

“Religion exists to explain the unexplained, to calm our fear of dying, but all it does is breed more fear and hatred.”

“Problem, purpose, conflict, goal. Use them. Think about them while you are in the planning phase of your novel; keep these elements at the back of your mind to guide you while you write. When you have written a scene, make sure they are all there, or that if one or another is missing, it is intentional and the effect is what you want.”

“Our heads have a nasty habit of ruining what can make us happiest. And there are times in our lives when you have to put aside what we think is best and do with what you feel is best.”

“One of the best possible perspectives from which to tell a story is that of a ghost, someone who is dead but can still witness.”

“As a young man, he was already rather pompous and full of himself, concerned with what he would write and with his early (and, later, perennial) hatred of Ireland and the Irish. When he had still written only a few poems, he asked his brother Stanislaus: “Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own…for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift.” When he was older his comparisons may have been less eucharistic and more modest, but he was always convinced of the extreme importance of his work, even before it existed.”