Top 1200 Irish Writers Quotes & Sayings - Page 19

I am half Bengali and half Irish by birth.

Howth is a wonderful part of the world. I love the Irish. Howth is extremely charming so anyone would be lucky to have a house there.

I would love to be able to speak my own language and maybe have an interview in Irish, maybe after my fights.

If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.

Islamic State practise a brand of Islamic law so strict that apparently Raqqa only has two Irish Pubs.

It's a loser's emblem (swastika), because the Nazis lost the war. It's ridiculous to suggest we are involved with fascists. All my best friends are black, gay, Irish or criminals.

Every Irish person of my generation and earlier, we were raised Catholic and we'd have to learn it in school, we'd to learn the catechism by rote.

I am Michael, and I am part English, Irish, German, and Scottish, sort of a virtual United Nations.

There was that sense that as soon as a Northern Irish person opens their mouth, you go, 'Ah, terrorist,' so I refused to do TV and film. Instead, I did theatre for 20 years.

We have, therefore, directed the Irish Army authorities to have field hospitals established in County Donegal adjacent to Derry and at other points along the Border where they may be necessary.

Yes, I am an Irish lass through and through.

It's true of Irish Catholic families. They're big on story telling and big on saving stories from one generation to the next.

I didn't know what was going on at the start in the swirling wind. The flags were all pointing in different directions and I thought the Irish had starched them just to fool us.

Why are Americans so fascinated by Ireland?" Keith asked... "you all think you're Irish. What's the appeal? Do you like the accent more? Is it all the magical rocks? Oh, look, a lep­rechaun.

So many Irish actors overplay that modesty because they're afraid people will judge them and say, 'The state of yer man, he thinks he's great,' or whatever.

Politics becomes a part of a writer's working life. The writer's protagonists are born in the context of the feelings that this atmosphere evokes. How can writers separate themselves from these feelings and create protagonists that come from Mars? Even writers who only write about psychological or internal issues or about love are writing under their prevailing atmosphere, and their writings will take on the hue of the time, place, and mood of their environment.

On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.

I'm born and raised in the Northeast. My parents are Irish immigrants. So our tendency is to shy away from the big yellow ball that comes up in the sky every once in a while.

But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America.

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.

The films that I've made with my company Irish DreamTime are close to my heart. 'The Greatest' being one of them, and 'Evelyn' being another.

In a study, scientists report that drinking beer can be good for the liver. I'm sorry, did I say 'scientists'? I meant Irish people.

Ninety percent I'll spend on good times, women and Irish Whiskey. The other ten percent I'll probably waste.

I must admit, even though I'm the product of two Jewish parents, I think the Irish temper got in there somewhere, so I'm going to check Mom's genealogy.

My mother - the Irish side of the family - was very musical. My mother was a singer; there was music around the house all the time.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart.

I've had the good fortune to read a lot of great American writers in translation, and my absolute beloved, for me one of the greatest writers ever, is Mark Twain. Yes, yes, yes. And Whitman, from whom the whole of 20th-century poetry sprung up. Whitman was the origin of things, someone with a completely different outlook. But I think that he's the father of the new wave in the world's poetry which to this very day is hitting the shore.

We should always aim to read something different=not only the writers with whom we agree, but those with whom we are ready to do battle. Their point of view challenges us to examine the truth and to test their views...and let us not comment on nor criticize writers of whom we have heard only second-hand, or third-hand without troubling to read their works for ourselves...Don't be afraid of new ideas.

I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself. When Anne Sexton admonished me, "We are all writing God's poem," I took it to mean there should be no competition between writers because we are all involved in a common project, a common prayer. But to Gore's and Norman's generation, particularly those male writers who served in the second world war, the prizefighter paradigm remains.

If there is a distinctive Irish experience, it is one of division, exacerbated by the fact that division in a country so small seems perverse. But the scale doesn't matter.

The strange thing is I can't play jigs or reels or any of that traditional Irish stuff as well as I ought to, whereas I think I have got a good ear for blues, the tonality of it and so on.

To be Irish today is the abandonment of shame and the younger people are moving it out and they're moving the fear away. They're not afraid, they're adventurous.

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.

Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.

The English treatment of the Irish was appalling. It was absolutely appalling.

I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they're English or American, from Manchester or London... or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.

Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.

St. Patrick... one of the few saints whose feast day presents the opportunity to get determinedly whacked and make a fool of oneself all under the guise of acting Irish.

Maybe some things that weren't so great were said about the Irish when they came. But Americans've done well by absorbing immigrants and it's made our nation stronger.

Writers have always liked my stuff, pretty much. That's what I wanted - I think my goal wasn't to get rich and famous, necessarily, though I cared about that. I always thought, "Oh, this could be a hit," or "that will sell records." But the first thing I wanted was that people who knew a lot about music, or had taste-making qualities, they would like my stuff. Writers, people like that.

I'm lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.

I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me

It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.

Extraordinary scenes there at the end. I think some of the crowd chanting 'Italy! Italy!' were actually Irish.

I see myself as part English and part American, with a dash of Irish thrown in, and a pinch of Italian from my mother's ancestry.

Many cultures believe that on a certain day - Halloween, the Irish Samhain Eve, Mexico's 'Dia de los Muertos' - the veil between this world and the next is especially thin.

I basically have the diet of a 19th-century Irish navy, apart from the litre of stout a day. It's meat and potatoes and bread and cheese: those are my four food groups.

Fiction is more dangerous than nonfiction because it can seduce better. I think we all know this, know that deeper truths can be approached in fiction than in fact. There are risks for the reader, because after reading certain books you find you have changed irreversibly. There are risks for writers: in China, now, and Ethiopia and other countries right now, writers face real persecution.

The economy in Ireland has been rampaging ahead for the last 15 years. Barring an international, political or natural catastrophe, things can only get better for the Irish.

When I hit the scene, there was Billy Connolly and Max Boyce. It was all mother-in-law and Irish jokes, and we broke the mould. Now there are thousands of comedians out there, and I don't think I can be above it all.

Cursing is heavily used in the Irish language. It's not a stretch for me, and I have no qualms about it. It doesn't fall far from the real me.

They say there are only two kinds of people on St. Patrick's Day: the Irish, and the people that drive them home.

If any Englishman said he has never called a Chinaman a chink he is lying. There is nothing bad about doing that. It is like calling the British Brits, or the Irish Paddies.

I'm from a small Irish family of 10, so there always was music in the house. Growing up, my older sisters had things like 'South Pacific' and opera on.

A more appropriate expansion is the statement "it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies" a transcript of a talk to a writers conference in Australia in 1996, where I had been asked to talk on "writers and intellectual responsibility" - a question that I said I found "puzzling," because I knew of nothing to say about it beyond truisms, though these were perhaps worth affirming because they are "so commonly denied, if not in words, then in consistent practice."

Desmond O'Grady is one of the senior figures in Irish Literary life, exemplary in the way he has committed himself over the decades to the vocation of poetry and has lived selflessly for the art

After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved - or I proved - that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.

There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.