“Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.”

Of two hearts one is always warm and one is always cold: the cold heart is more precious than diamonds: the warm heart has no value and is thrown away.

All good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism; what you forget goes into the compost of the imagination.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

She mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time.

So it always is: when you escape to a desert the silence shouts in your ear.

There was always another side to a joke, the side of the victim.

They are always saying God loves us. If thats love I’d rather have a bit of kindness.

Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

It would be nice to feel that we are a better world, a world of more compassion and a world of more humanity, and to believe in the basic goodness of man.

As you get older, you start to really ask questions like, ‘Is this the road I should be walking down?,’ because every decision seems more final, as you get older.

I feel like the luckiest child in the world because I got to grow up in Ireland. In summer is when you really grow up. During the year, I would go back to the States, and all year long really couldn’t wait to get back to Ardmore.

Looking good and feeling good go hand in hand. If you have a healthy lifestyle, your diet and nutrition are set and you’re working out, you’re going to feel good.

If Pakistan feels Indian positions are pre-conditions, then there will be no talks.

Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.

There is nothing better than strolling down the beach the way God made you.

My gut feeling about sequels is that they should be premeditated: You should try to write a trilogy first or at least sketch out a trilogy if you have any faith in your film.