History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.
When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.
It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.
We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.
Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country. It is being at odds withother nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.
Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.
Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.
In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.
Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.
The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
what makes us so afraid is the thing we half see, or half hear, as in a wood at dusk, when a tree stump becomes an animal and a sound becomes a siren. And most of that fear is the fear of not knowing, of not actually seeing correctly.
Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.
Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.
Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.
In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things.
It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.
I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.
it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.
... a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring.
She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give.
To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.
Promiscuity is the death of love.
fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.
For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.
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