Irish Novelist Quotes

James Joyce

Bram Stoker

Elizabeth Bowen

Cecelia Ahern

Colm Tóibín

Maeve Binchy

Flann O'Brien

I am naturally taciturn, and became a silent and attentive listener.

William Hamilton Maxwell

There is something wonderful about a death, how everything shuts down, and all the ways you thought you were vital are not even vaguely important. Your husband can feed the kids, he can work the new oven, he can find the sausages in the fridge, after all. And his important meeting was not important, not in the slightest.

With gas cookers and chip pans in every kitchen, the chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down. The second technique was the ever popular chimney fire and number three had to be the drunken cigarette drop on the carpet. Mind you, why they'd be cooking chips at this hour was anyone's guess.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

For righteous monarchs,
Justly to judge, with their own eyes should see;
To rule o'er freemen, should themselves be free.

Experience has taught me that what you love, you should love all the harder because someday it will be gone.

A great deal of thought must be given to your daughter's marriage. Otherwise, she will simply slink off like a cat on a dark night to be fertilized under a bush to God knows whom!

There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.

But pain is hard to put into words and in life there is always pain. It's as natural as birth or death. Pain makes us who we are, it teaches us and tames us, it can destroy and it can save.

I have learned in my thirty-odd years of serious writing only one sure lesson: stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

Seán Ó Faoláin

She said, 'God knows they owe me nought,
I tossed them to the foaming sea,
I tossed them to the howling wastes,
Yet still their love comes home to me.'

In this curious world there are certain beings to whom it is given to say of all things with naïve faith, not 'I shall seek,' but 'I shall find.'

Katherine Thurston

How many brave Men, courageous Women, and innocent Children did I see butcher'd, to do God good Service?... I went to the Irish Rebellion, where I saw more than three hundred thousand Souls murder'd in cold Blood.crying, Nits will become Lice, destroy Root and Branch: with a thousand other Barbarities, too tedious as well as too dreadful to repeat, beside what has been transacted abroad.

Each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals.

Yes, we'll have to put a stop to this bookworming. No future in that.

Awake thee, my Lady-Love! Wake thee, and rise! The sun through the bower peeps Into thine eyes.

The whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things.

The human face does not always reflect the beauty that may repose in the soul.

Hundreds of butts in piles on the ground to mark the spot, their lives sucked out of them by their users in panicked distressed frenzy, their souls floating around the insides of lungs while their outsides were dropped, stamped on and deserted

Far, far away, there is a beautiful Country which no human eye has ever seen in waking hours. Under the Sunset it lies, where the distant horizon bounds the day, and where the clouds, splendid with light and colour, give a promise of the glory and beauty which encompass it. Sometimes it is given to us to see it in dreams.

"Take my own father! You know what he said in his last moments? On his deathbed, he defied me to name a man who had enjoyed a better life. In spite of the dreadful pain, his face radiated happiness," said Mother, nodding her head comfortably. "Happiness drives out pain, as fire burns out fire."

Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them... a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round. Boys like me, aged 15 — if one of them had... yeah, it would have been absolutely no problem for me aged 15. It didn't happen, but it wouldn't have been a problem.

I nearly went fucking crazy crazy. Notes [from a Coma] marked a sort of natural breakdown with Jonathan Cape. The book got a good critical response but it didn't too well. So publishers look at you then and think, okay, he writes good books but... If you have that experimental twist, you make things hard for yourself. So for those five years, I couldn't give my work away. It was tough on me and for people around me. But as my wife Maeve said to me, it isn't my job to get published... it is my job to write.

The Greeks were the first boxers. Pugilism appears to have been one of the earliest distinctions in play and exercise that appeared between the Hellenes and their Asiatic fathers. The unarmed personal encounter was indicative of a sturdier manhood.

John Boyle O'Reilly

How many chapters have been written about love verses - and how many more might be written! - might, would, could, should, or ought to be written! - I will venture to say, will be written!