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"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space."
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"Big Brother is watching you."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Never give up your wife, husband, children and families. Believe that people can change. Give others opportunity to change."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Blessed is the womb that born you."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Until now, you have always lived your life alone. Every decision you've made has been for you and you alone. Now, and for the rest of your days, your life will be tied to another's. Every decision you make will be for both of you. What one does affects the other. You are a family, a team inseparable and unbreakable."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A rubber plant is just about the ideal family."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Father, I know you will hear me, I will speak."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When we sat down on the couch again, you curled up against my side, like you used to when you were a tod."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Children are angels."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex."
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
"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
"We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places."
Religion
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