He has a remarkable tendency to read his life as a literary text, interpreting it with the distortions befitting the complusive reader he's been for so many years.

"Imagine," he says to his mother, "that an Irish politician or bishop commits a terrible act. Finé. You'd want to know exactly how things had happened. Isn't that right"?
"I think so."
"Well for the Irish, this is secondary. What they care about is how the politician or the bishop is going to explain himself. If they're able to justify themselves with grace, that is, with a gripping, human story, they'll get out of their predicament without much trouble."

Sensing that it won't be long before her dear autistic husband goes and sits in front of the computer, she tells him that people who regularly use Google gradually lose the ability to read literary works with any kind of depth, which serves to demonstrate how digital knowledge can be linked to the recent stupidity in the world.

"The search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living."

At a press conferance, Claire Keegan replied almost angrily to a journalist who wanted to know what topics she wrote about in her novels: "I'm Irish. I write about dysfunctional families, miserable, loveless lives, illness, old age, winter, the grey weather, boredom, and rain."
And at her side, Colum McCann concluded his colleague's contribution, speaking in an exguisite plural, a la John Ford: "We don't usually talk publicly about ourselves, we prefer to read."