A Quote by Kevin Barry

Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious. — © Kevin Barry
Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.
I read one of the funniest books last week by Don DeLillo. He wrote this book, 'Amazons' many years ago, under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell. The book is very funny but I also think it's funny that he denies any involvement with it.
I re-read The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. It's a book every one should read, particularly Americans, as the USA is her primary focus. Her book demonstrates that white is not universal, that white is not neutral, that it has a history, which she eloquently delineates. It's not often you finish a book understanding how the world operates better than before you read it.
I didn't read a serious book until I was 19.
As long as the White House is deadly serious, which they tell me they are, I'll help them anyway I can.
At age 19, I read a book [The Intelligent Investor] and what I'm doing today, at age 76, is running things through the same thought process I learned from the book I read at 19.
I won't read a book that starts with a description of the weather. I don't read books over 300 pages, though I'll make an exception for Don Delillo.
Comedy is serious - deadly serious. Never, never try to be funny! The actors must be serious. Only the situation must be absurd. Funny is in the writing, not in the performing. If the situation isn't absurd, no amount of joke will help.
My mum had a cousin that had played when he was younger. When I showed an interest in drumming, he showed me how to mummy-daddy roll and that set me up for a bit. And to be honest, it's all about the sound, the noise, the rattle and hum. Who wouldn't want to make a fantastic noise with drums and cymbals?!
Journalism should be truthful and entertaining. You know, with news and important facts you can entertain people too. Have a little humor. Life isn't all that deadly all the time, but while you're having fun, tell the truth. If every word of a column is deadly serious, I can't read it. It makes me throw up.
For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.
One time when somebody showed up in a wedding dress, but I never knew if it was a joke, or she was serious. She asked me to marry her. She was serious. It was pretty funny.
Even when I'm being funny, I'm deadly serious.
People would ask me, 'Is he as funny at home as he is in the movies?' ... I would have to answer, 'Well, he can be funny. But he is also very serious. He has insomnia and if we him up early, he would bawl the hell out of me'.
In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.
I dont like any of them, because they don't read the books. In Kiss Me Deadly my story is better than his story. Anthony Quinn played in The Lond Wait and he didn't read the book either.
The book that made me decide to go into Russian literature was 'Anna Karenina,' which I first read in high school. The thing that appealed to me and constituted its Russianness for me was that it was simultaneously incredibly funny and sad.
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