Brendan Behan Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

Brendan Behan
Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

Brendan Behan
It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.

Brendan Behan
A man is already halfway in love with any woman who listens to him.

Brendan Behan
The sun was in mind to come out but having a look at the weather it was in lost heart and went back again.

Brendan Behan
The ordinariness of people is what is often extraordinary.

Brendan Behan
The most important things to do in this world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.

Brendan Behan
But then Americans are always boasting about bribery and corruption, as if it was their own special invention, and as if nobody else had any.

Brendan Behan
A general and a bit of shooting makes you forget your troubles... it takes your mind off the cost of living.

Brendan Behan
God forgive us-but most of us grew up to be the sort of men our mothers warned us against.

Brendan Behan
An author's first duty is to let down his country.

Brendan Behan
My sins had fallen from me, because I had almost forgotten that there were such things and, when I got over it, my expulsion from religion, it was like being pushed outside a prison and told not to come back.

Brendan Behan
Mother, they would praise my balls if I hung them high enough.
Speaking of newspaper critics

Brendan Behan
What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

Brendan Behan
He was born an Englishman and remained one for years.

Brendan Behan
I only drink on two occasions — When I am thirsty and when I'm not.

Brendan Behan
When asked what was the message of his play, The Hostage, about a kidnapped English soldier:
Message? Message? What the hell do you think I am, a bloody postman?

Brendan Behan
All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.

Brendan Behan
There's no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.

Brendan Behan
Lying in bed, I could hear the trams far away in the distance. Turning the corners heavily, and gathering speed for the hills. I used to hear them back in Dublin on the Northside when I was small, lying in bed, avoiding the eye of the Sacred Heart in the picture on the far wall.

Brendan Behan
He might have even forgotten what he'd told me; liars need good memories, but don't often have them, as I know, and everyone else knows from personal experience.

Brendan Behan
I saw a notice which said 'Drink Canada Dry' and I've just started.

Brendan Behan
Never throw stones at your mother,
You'll be sorry for it when she's dead,
Never throw stones at your mother,
Throw bricks at your father instead.

Brendan Behan
My grandmother took a bath every year, whether she was dirty or not.

Brendan Behan
It's a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on with.

Brendan Behan
When I came back to Dublin, I was courtmartialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Brendan Behan
One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough.

Brendan Behan
Pat: He was an Anglo-Irishman.
Meg: In the blessed name of God what's that?
Pat: A Protestant with a horse.

Brendan Behan
Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

Brendan Behan
It's great to be on your own for a bit, in the sun, and in the country. That's one thing you never were in Walton. Nor any other prison, I suppose. For all their solitary confinement you were watched and your every moment — even at times when you'd give a dog a bit of privacy. What they call in Irish — "Uaigneas gan ciuneas" — loneliness without peace.

Brendan Behan