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"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."
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"They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate."
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Personal Development
"The one overall structure in my plays is language."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you can not master your language you must be it's slave."
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Personal Development
"Speaks cheerful English and in the past has written this language with a paintbrush that talks."
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Personal Development
"Conundrum: A fun word to repeat over and over again when no one's listening. Actual meaning is as puzzling as the need to chant the word."
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Personal Development
"The wonder of words."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language."
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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
"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
"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
"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
"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."
Truth
"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
"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
"I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor."
Love
"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
"I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years."
Time
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