I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.
to leap is not only to leap, it is to hit the ground somewhere.
Jealousy is no more than feeling alone against smiling enemies.
Disappointment tears the bearable film off life.
There's something so showy about desperation, it takes hard wits to see it's a grandiose form of funk.
Good-byes breed a sort of distaste for whomever you say good-bye to; this hurts, you feel, this must not happen again.
Not only is there no question of solitude, but in the long run we may not choose our company.
She had one of those charming faces which, according to the angle from which you see them, look either melancholy or impertinent. Her eyes were grey; her trick of narrowing them made her seem to reflect, the greater part of the time, in the dusk of her second thoughts. With that mood, that touch of arriere pensee, went an uncertain, speaking set of lips.
Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.
Dialogue must appear realistic without being so. Actual realism-the lifting, as it were, of passages from a stenographer's take-down of a 'real life' conversation-would be disruptive. Of what? Of the illusion of the novel. In 'real life' everything is diluted; in the novel everything is condensed.
Reason can never reconcile one to life: nothing allays the wants one cannot explain.
No one of the characters in my novels has originated, so far as I know, in real life. If anything, the contrary was the case: persons playing a part in my life--the first twenty years of it--had about them something semi-fictitious.
The most steady, the most self-sufficient nature depends, more than it knows, on its few chosen stimuli.
I pity people who do not care for Society. They are poorer for the oblation they do not make.
Have not all poetic truths been already stated? The essence of a poetic truth is that no statement of it can be final.
Raids are slightly constipating.
Story involves action. Action towards an end not to be foreseen (by the reader) but also towards an end which, having been reached, must be seen to have been from the start inevitable.
Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.
... into the novel goes such taste as I have for rational behaviour and social portraiture. The short story, as I see it to be, allows for what is crazy about humanity: obstinacies, inordinate heroisms, "immortal longings.
[My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.
Fantasy is toxic: the private cruelty and the world war both have their start in the heated brain.
A novel which survives, which withstands and outlives time, does do something more than merely survive. It does not stand still. It accumulates round itself the understanding of all these persons who bring to it something of their own. It acquires associations, it becomes a form of experience in itself, so that two people who meet can often make friends, find an approach to each other, because of this one great common experience they have had.
The passion of vanity has its own depths in the spirit, and is powerfully militant.
What's the matter with this country is the matter with the lot of us individually - our sense of personality is a sense of outrage.
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