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"The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese."
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"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There is more pleasure in loving than in being beloved."
Author Name
Personal Development
"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Being brilliant is no great feat if you respect nothing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Where every something, being blent together turns to a wild of nothing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Quit aspiring and dreaming and start being."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese."
Being
"When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody."
Attitude
"For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970."
People
"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
Time
"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."
Language
"My father was very outwardly religious."
Family
"Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century."
Society
"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."
Difference
"Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity."
Cultural
"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television."
Advice
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