top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Irish Authors
"I spent many years laughing at Harry Secombe's singing until somebody told me that it wasn't a joke."
"Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other; two gay guardian angels every human ought to have."
"I am happy at Leeds and I want to stay. There has been talk that Leeds might sell some players, but all the players believe we can win some silverware next season and it is important that we are all kept together."
"Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both."
"The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming."
"The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you."
"No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly."
"If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free; if our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed."
"Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick."
"The cup of Ireland's misery has been overflowing for centuries and is not yet half full."
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong."
"I am not young enough to know everything."
"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity."
"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."
"Making peace, I have found, is much harder than making war."
"Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else."
"Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The things that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them."
"One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be."
"She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech."
"The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you."
"Winning the Pulitzer is not that big a deal. I have seen hundreds of plays that have won the prize and you couldn't sit half way through it. The Pulitzer is a common prize that means very little."
"I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution."
"If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example."
"You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."
"I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other."
"It never felt real to me. I never felt I had complete ownership over Bond. Because you'd have these stupid one-liners - which I loathed - and I always felt phony doing them."
"A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups."
"If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion."
"Waking up with a bad head in the morning is difficult sometimes."
"Friendship will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long."
bottom of page