“Your life is in some bizarre state when priests are throwing abuse at you on the street.”

“There'll be times when the only refuge is books. Then you'll read as if you meant it, as if your life depended on it.”

“I get through some print.”

“The Local Paper here asked that me books be banned........THE HIGHEST PRAISE for an Irish writer.”

“The whiskey kicked like a mugger.”

“And then some guy wandering as lost as you would all of a sudden be right before your eyes, his face bigger and clearer than you ever saw a man’s face before in your life. Your eyes were working so hard to see in that fog that when something did come in sight every detail was ten times as clear as usual, so clear both of you had to look away. When a man showed up you didn’t want to look at his face and he didn’t want to look at yours, because it’s painful to see somebody so clear that it’s like looking inside him, but then neither did you want to look away and lose him completely. You had a choice: you could either strain and look at things that appeared in front of you in the fog, painful as it might be, or you could relax and lose yourself.”

“Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing.”