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"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."
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"Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The last resort of kings, the cannonball. The last resort of the people, the paving stone."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are bad people who would be less dangerous if they were quite devoid of goodness."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"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 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
"But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader."
World
"Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners."
People
"When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not."
Reflection
"Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church."
Gratitude
"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other."
Reading
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