Status Updates From Penguin A Guest at the Feast.

'I don't have a fairy fort in my garden, but if I did I wouldn't allow it to be removed, and if it were removed I would expect bad luck, and soon. (My neighbors have one, and it won't in our lifetime or any foreseeable lifetime be bulldozed, although it is in the way.)'

'Irish Catholicism has many mansions, but one of them includes a good bedrock of paganism, or animism. I've never heard the banshee knock on my door in the night to announce that someone in the family would soon die, but I think I would know the sound if I heard it.'

'I saw most of the Bergman films... and I believed in their northern gloom and deep seriousness as I believed in nothing else.

'As she dropped by on her way back from a performance, I loved asking her if there had been a big crowd at the play. This is what you did in Enniscorthy, where I'm from. If anyone has been out anywhere--at mass, a football match, downtown, in Dublin, to the pub--you asked them: "Was there a big crowd?"'