"Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead."

"Nations have their ego, just like individuals."

"No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination."

"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality."

"The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you."

"Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize."

"A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery."

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

"He found in the world without as actual what was in his world within as possible."

"You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman."

"Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow."

"Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion."

"Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why."

"Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."

"There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being."

"I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day."

"Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America."

"I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction."

"The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works."

"When I die Dublin will be written in my heart."

"I fear those big words which make us so unhappy."

"Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not."

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery."

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts."

"Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality."

"If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European."

"My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a quagmire."

"And then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes."

"Ireland sober is Ireland stiff."

"Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse."

"My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions."

"Satan, really, is the romantic youth of Jesus re-appearing for a moment."

"The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."

"Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home."

"A nation is the same people living in the same place."

"Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance."