“Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.”

“The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt.”

“Love and freedom are such hideous words. So many cruelties have been done in their name.”

“Happy as a threaded needle”

“There is nothing worse than the ambitions of a talentless person.”

“The world's full of idiots, divas and assholes, mainly in Ireland. In Ireland, one cannot achieve anything if he is not a little wacky. That's a holy truth. It just simply cannot be otherwise.”

“Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder.”