“Oh, all kinds of lunacy happens in Ireland, all kinds of lunacy.” — Anjelica Huston

When you're in your twenties, you're made of expectations, and when they're shattered, you don't know how to behave. The fact is if you react really outraged, you fear that you'll get dropped and feel even more terrible. But there's only a certain amount you can put up with before you become obnoxious in your own eyes, right?

I was an avid reader as a child because we didn't have television in Ireland until the mid-'60s.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is such a powerful book, and 'Love in the Time of Cholera' is so strangely, brilliantly optimistic.

I must confess I love female writers: Jane Austen, Isak Dinesen, Colette, Willa Cather, Dawn Powell, Joan Didion. I grew up on the Bronte sisters, and Daphne du Maurier.