“Sit and quiet yourself. Luxuriate in a certain memory and the details will come. Let the images flow. You’ll be amazed at what will come out on paper. I’m still learning what it is about the past that I want to write. I don’t worry about it. It will emerge. It will insist on being told.”

“You can't teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don't you?”

“But I don't know how I'll ever get a college degree and rise in the world with no high school diploma and eyes like piss holes in the snow, as everyone tells me.”

“In New York, with Prohibition in full swing, he thought he had died and gone o hell for his sins. Then he discovered speakeasies and he rejoiced.”

“No one is so busy they can't take time to make a decent cup of tea and if you are that busy you don't deserve a decent cup of tea for what is it all about anyway? Are we put in this world to be busy or to chat over a nice cup of tea?”

“There's nothing sillier in the world than a teacher telling you don't do it after you already did it.”

“A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse”

“The English wouldn't give you the steam of their piss.”

“I'm sitting up in the bed with my knees pulled to my chest and there are tears that won't come to my eyes but beat instead like a small sea around my heart.”

“Your mind is a treasure house that you should stock well and it’s the one part of you the world can’t interfere with.”

“Then he placed on my tongue the wafer, the body and blood of Jesus. At last, at last. It’s on my tongue. I draw it back. It stuck. I had God glued to the roof of my mouth. I could hear the master’s voice, Don’t let that host touch your teeth for if you bite God in two you’ll roast in hell for eternity. I tried to get God down with my tongue but the priest hissed at me, Stop that clucking and get back to your seat.”

“They can afford to smile because they all have teeth so dazzling if they dropped them in the snow they'd be lost forever.”

“I'm in New York, land of the free and home of the brave, but I'm supposed to behave as if I were in Limerick at all times.”

“When I act tough they listen politely till the spasm passes. They know.”

“Teaching is bringing the news.”

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

"At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality."

"Most victories are, in the best way, acts of revenge."

"Paying tax should be framed as a glorious civic duty worthy of gratitude - not a punishment for making money."

"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains."

"Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food."

"Getting to the top has an unfortunate tendency to persuade people that the system is OK after all."

"It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day."

"The sole cause of a man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room."