We can all have plenty of lives, but there are limits. You never can tell what they are.

There will always be reservations, things one must leave out, events one can’t explain without handing over a full map of one’s life, unfolding it, making clear that all the lines and contours stand for...

For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners, and indeed, the morals...

She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.

But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and...

He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent...

A novelist’s job is almost to be a stupid as possible, except in the cunning moment when you need to structure something, when you need to be very intelligent indeed. The rest of the time,...

Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can’t be done abruptly.”[Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013]

It is terrible to be an unprotected being.

None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they...

In the morning, she was not sure that she had slept as much as lived a set of vivid dreams, letting them linger so that she would not have to open her eyes and see...

His consolation was that at least he had known her as the world had not, and the pain of living without her was no more than a penalty he paid for the privilege of having...

There’s an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but...

She has gone back to Brooklyn,’ her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean...