"You always hesitate to say that an author's first book is their best but The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is such a triumph and a masterpiece, it has to be said," said Bernard MacLaverty, who grew up close to Brian Moore's home in Belfast. Both novelists attended St Malachy's College, which was profiled in Moore's The Feast of Lupercal.
"Brian was a storyteller who wrestled with serious human issues. He wasn't avant garde in the way Joyce or Beckett was but his struggle with language and the human condition was always interesting and exciting.
"The last time we met was five years ago at a film conference. He was talking about working on the screenplay of Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. He told this lovely story of how Hitchcock would describe the settings and interiors and action to him in exhaustive detail, and then say to him: `Brian, can you go away now and dialogue all that in for me?' "
"He was a civilised man in an uncivilised world," said Dermot Healy. "I was amazed to hear he was the age he was when he died. I only met him the once: some time in the early 1980s, when he was on a reading tour.
"To me, he was like a kind of travelling version of Sean O'Faolain, the way he went around the world. He wrote such a huge mix of various types of fiction, but I think his first book, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, was the best."
"I read Judith Hearne when I was a teenager and it made such an impact on me that I have never read it again," said Anne Enright. "I thought it was so sad. Brian Moore captured the sadness of respectability which pervaded Ireland during that era. It was almost impossible to keep reading that novel when the respectability in it became frayed. I never went to see the film - God, no way!
"I wasn't allowed read some of his books when I was small. Being set in Ireland, the strong content in them was considered too much for me. Too close to home. He never strained to capture women characters, it seemed to come so easily, and he captured their personas with such respect.
"I don't necessarily think of him as an Irish writer first, because he lived abroad for so long and he didn't seem to want to be identified as that. And I think he'll live longer than most Irish writers for that reason - he never hopped on the social bandwagon that so many other Irish writers did later on."
"I never had the privilege of meeting him," Eugene McCabe said "but to me, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is the Madame Bovary of Irish fiction. That novel will have a lasting impact on Irish fiction. Moore very seldom gets the mention here that is due to his work, yet he has produced work of the calibre of Brian Friel.
"I do believe that first novel, Judith Hearne, was his best. He never wrote anything quite as good as it again. It was like he had one big theme which he kept repeating - like Flaubert - and which diffused itself after that first initial statement."
To Seamus Heaney, Brian Moore's "writerly solidarity" always meant a lot in the past - as well as what Heaney described as his personal kindness. "I loved his good cheer and his downbeat honesty. He won his creative freedom early and preserved it with great constancy.
"To the end, he had an undaunted trust in his gift and fidelity to his vocation. His novels have marked us all and the future will know us by them."
"Brian Moore was my favourite Irish novelist. I have the utmost admiration for him," declared Dermot Bolger. "Whenever people ask me for advice about writing, I tell them to read Brian Moore. I met him once and felt very privileged to do so. I loved the fact that he just got on with it and wrote his novels, with no fuss.
"He was always totally engaged in the world. He lived in his imagination in a way that other writers are rooted in physical places. He wrote as effortlessly in the voice of a woman as he did of a man.
"Every three years or so, he reinvented himself by writing an entirely different novel. People say the novel is dead but the novel will never be dead because people love stories. And Brian Moore was a master at bringing readers into a story."
Paying tribute, Belfast writer Sam McAughtry said: "In my opinion he was the greatest male writer who could write accurately from the woman's point of view."
