“She must have received some great news, because yesterday her hair was white and today it is completely blond.”

“With her braided hair and white dress, she seemed to glow in the moonlight.”

“Between the black of yesterday and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with nostalgia and fear of the future.”

“Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.”

“A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?”

“Today a woman must ignore her reflection in the eyes of her lover, since he might admire her, and seek it in the gaze of the God of Beauty, in whose perception she is never complete.”

“Yonder comes my lady
Rainbow ribbons in her hair
Yonder comes my lady
Rainbow ribbons in her hair
Six white horses and a carriage
She's returning from the fair”

“Being blonde is definitely a different state of mind. I can't really put my finger on it, but the artifice of being blonde has some incredible sort of sexual connotation. Men really respond to it. I love blonde hair but it really does something different to you. I feel more grounded when I have dark hair, and I feel more ethereal when I have light hair. It's unexplainable. I also feel more Italian when my hair is dark. ”

“When I created Quirke, he was 6ft 6in and blond. But then a woman reader wrote to me and said, 'Why do you keep saying his hair is blond? It's not. It's brown.' I wrote back to her and told her that, of course, she was right. So I darkened his hair and now that he's being played by Gabriel Byrne; with each successive book he gets a bit smaller and smaller.”

“I had long blonde hair, but even as a little girl with long blonde hair, I looked like one of the Hanson boys.”