"I've said to others that there were places I had forgotten about that were just so powerful. I've read the Gospels many times, but it's been a while since I've read through a whole book"

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas"

"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space"

"I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake"

"I still do some inking here and there and I've actually got a book that I'm going to ink entirely"

"The two most powerful warriors are patience and time"

"A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love"

"The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of "eternity"; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book"

"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book"

"I am mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too"

"Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom"