Every one of these books is going to have one really big surprise in it to make people say, 'I didn't realize that,'

Wherever they went the Irish brought with them their books, many unseen in Europe for centuries and tied to their waists as signs of triumph, just as Irish heroes had once tied to their waists their enemies' heads. Where they went they brought their love of learning and their skills in bookmaking. In the bays and valleys of their exile, they reestablished literacy and breathed new life into the exhausted literary culture of Europe.
And that is how the Irish saved civilization.

It must be hell on a writer who is introverted and doesn't really want to talk to people,

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books

I always go for the sex and violence, ... If you can be great, you should talk about love and death. And if you can only be good, you should talk about sex and violence. Those are the things people are perennially interested in.

(The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, ... That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.