"[Albert Camus] was viewed by many as an austere moralist, but it was on the football pitch and in the theatre that he learnt his 'morality'. It's something sensed, it won't pass uniquely through thought. It couldn't possibly."

“I should have been thinking more about my family, how I raised my children, how I maintained life's work, so to speak.”

“I am the father of twin sons that were born in Philadelphia at Pennsylvania Hospital in 1983. They were 13 weeks premature. Gerry weighed 1 pound 14 ounces, and Zachary 1 pound 11 ounces. They were the first male twins to ever survive at Pennsylvania Hospital.”

“Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.”

Source : Sebastian Barry (2008). “The Secret Scripture”, p.163, Faber & Faber

“We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another. From this there is no escape. We may collaborate either well or poorly or we may refuse to collaborate, but even to refuse to collaborate is to exert an influence and to affect the quality of the product. This is only a way of saying that by ourselves we have no meaning and no dignity; by ourselves we are outside the human definition, outside our identity.”

“Quite frankly, I am not very comfortable in chitchat. When I go to board meetings, I arrive two minutes before and leave when it's over. I don't stay for lunch or go early and have coffee.”

“The physical world is meaningless tonight And there is no other.”

“I would have been able to free a thousand more slaves if I could only have convinced them that they were slaves.”

“I'm not trying to be something that I'm not. I'm just trying to be myself and talk about what I know, and admit what I don't know.”