top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
More
"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
More
"I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years."
Time
"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
"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."
Family
"The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book."
Church
"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 belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer."
People
"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
"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."
Truth
"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
"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
bottom of page