Well, I think some people are very happy in retirement. And in a year and a half I'm going to see how happy I feel in retirement. I'm just going to not work quite so hard, but I'll continue to write as long as God gives me breath.

Food is a great way of communicating.

There's nothing trite about being consoled in a world that does everything in its power to deliver sorrow.

Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.

To God, thy country, and thy friend be true.

History should belong to all of us, and it needs to include people from different cultural backgrounds. Otherwise, it risks becoming irrelevant to children, who could then become disenchanted with education.

Once in my childhood I had been eager to learn Irish; I thought to get leave to take lessons from an old Scripture-reader who spent a part of his time in the parish of Killinane, teaching such scholars as he could find to read their own language in the hope that they might turn to the only book then being printed in Irish, the Bible.

I kept a steel wall around my moral and sexual instincts - protecting them, I thought, from the threats of the real world. This gave me a tremendous advantage in politics, if not in my soul. The true me, my spiritual core, slipped further and further from reach.