top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
More

"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"
Author Name
Personal Development

"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."
Author Name
Personal Development

"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"
Author Name
Personal Development

"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."
Author Name
Personal Development

"What you are seeking is yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The world is full of vanities."
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