Quotes from Pete McCarthy

There are huge creative advantages in having huge chunks of time when no one can find you. Emails and phones have diluted the experience of travel.

I like reading in a pub rather than a library or study, as it's generally much easier to get a drink.

I reckon if I can't spend the day sleeping, the next best thing is to spend it reading and drinking.

If you've had the right kind of education, it's amazing how many things you can find to feel guilty about.

Just remember, it's an easy place to be at home in, Ireland. I think the people are very skilled at relating. I notice, watching the different nationalities on the mountain, the fluidity of interaction the Irish people have with the visitors, and with each other. It's a skill that's less developed in other nationalities, and it's so instinctive it doesn't even look like a skill.

But once you cross the Shannon - even though geographically you have only come a short distance - different rules of time apply, and most people still understand the crucial secret of human happiness: that it's better to do a few things slowly, than a lot of things fast.

We had found nothing, and had been lost several times already in one morning, so this was shaping up into a top travel experience.

That guy in the corner. Never tells the truth, as a matter of principle. Why answer a question, he says, if you can tell a good story instead?

It's always stimulating to visit new places, acquire fresh knowledge and expand your portfolio of nightmares.

If life is a book, then read it while you can.

Where's the incentive to be frugal with life's pleasures, to save up the pages in your favourite book for later, if you're going to be plunged into the darkened abyss at some arbitrary hour? If life is a book, then read it while you can. Don't save up any pages for later, because there might not be one.

I find myself thinking, and not for the first time, just how useful wilderness must be when it comes to burying a troublesome relative, or a complete stranger.

The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on an Italian tourist's pint. There was a big cheer, and Con the barman rang a bell on the counter. St Patrick's Day, and McCarthy's Bar was heaving.

Never pass a bar with your name on it

I use the pay phone to call my friend Noel. The last time I was here he took me up a mountainside in Connemara with a seventy-eight-year-old poteen-maker who'd learned his craft as a teenager from his father. We spent the day watching him double-distill brown bog water in two oil drums over a turf fire into something that tasted like the finest malt. Noel acted as interpreter, as the old man spoke no English. Perhaps he'll have another adventure in store for me this time.

Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place where you've never lived, but your ancestors have? Or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgement fuddled by nostalgia, Guinness, and the romance of the diaspora?

Mind you, he looks a bit out of it, gazing around in confusion, as if his sax player's brain has been removed and replaced with a drummer's.

Immediately across the road is a ruined abbey and cemetery. As I haven't visited one since late yesterday afternoon, I decide to take a look. On the whole, it's fair to say that, if you're travelling round the west of Ireland, an interest in ruined abbeys, however slight, will stand you in better stead than a passion for rollerblading, say or a penchant for showbiz gossip.

I will go outside, wander about aimlessly, and see what happens.

The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on an Italian tourist's pint. There was a big cheer, and Con the barman rang a bell on the counter.

There's a man at the gate, watching me. 'Have ya fallen and hurt yourself, or are ye just afraid of the cow?

Feeling bad at breakfast because you don't have a hangover is evidence of a complex emotional life it can take many years to perfect.

Wherever you go in the world, there will be people to tell you it'll be bigger, stranger, better, more authentic if you take the time to go somewhere else instead; but if you are there, you won't be here. You can only be at one place at a time, and sleep in one bed each night. Sometimes it's good to know where you are when you wake up.

I find my grandfather, buried with Great-Aunt Hannah and Uncle Jack. His surname is spelled 'MacCarthy', with an extra 'a'; like many names here, it's a translation from the Irish, so the 'a' is optional, and may appear and disappear with the generations.