I swooned the first time I saw Charlo. I actually did. I didn't faint or fall on the floor but my legs went rubbery on me and I giggled. I suddenly knew that I had lungs because they were empty and co...
If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.
They didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that robbing had nothing to do with what we wanted; it was the dare, the terror, the getting away with it.
Terror. That was it.
She'd tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty.
She’s happier than Nicola. That’s probably true. Alcoholics can stop drinking but what is there for the children of alcoholics? Is it always too late? Probably. She doesn’t know.
But it wasn’t boring like this; I loved it, sitting there doing nothing. There wasn’t even anything to look at except the houses across the road.
No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about ch...
We'll cry, she said. An then we'll stop. Because it's only a house.
I live on an island called Ireland where most of the music is shite. I grew up listening to Danny Boy; I grew up hating Danny Boy, and all his siblings and his granny. The pipes, the pipes are caw-haw...
If you were going to be best friends with anyone - Kevin - you had to hate a lot of other people, the two of you, together. It made you better friends.
I was going. I couldn’t stay here. Every breath of its stale air, every square inch of the place mocked me, grabbed at my ankles. It needed blood to survive and it wasn’t going to get mine.
I knew all the books in the house. I knew their shapes and smells. I knew what pages would open if I held them with the spine on the ground and let the sides drop. I knew all the books but I couldn't...
Four generations of women--I'm a woman, Mary said to herself--heading off on a journey in a car. One of the dead, one of them dying, one of the driving, one of them just staring out.
Brother Jimmy, said Joey the Lips. - I'm worried. - About Dean. - Wha' abou' Dean? - He told me he's been listening to jazz. - What's wrong with tha'? Jimmy wanted to know. - Everything, said Joey the...
— It’s gas but, isn’t it? How we get suckered in. Some prick in a white coat says if you eat all o’ your peas Gina Lollobrigida will sit on your face.
They were our friends because we hated them; it was good to have them around. I was cleaner than them, brainier than them. I was better than them.
Not songs abou’ Fianna fuckin’ Fail or annythin’ like tha’. Real politics. (They weren’t with him.) —Where are yis from? (He answered the question himself.) —Dublin. (He asked another one.) —Wha’ part...
To claim that music is more important than oxygen would be trite and sentimental. It would also be true.
Fuck was the best word. The most dangerous word. You couldn't whisper it. Fuck was always too loud, too late to stop it, it burst in the air above you and fell slowly right over your head. There was t...