Playwrights From Ireland

"When we're young, we leave home and we think we're leaving behind us our roots. And we do leave them behind for a time. And then they catch up with us, and they twine themselves around us and that's a great thing."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) “Old Wounds,” by Edna O’Brien, haunts me as though I’ve lived it."

"To make a story both more alive and more suspenseful one has to think of altering the point of view of each chapter. In doing that one changes styles because each person thinks differently. I find it stimulating though a little daunting, but as reader and writer I am not interested in anything less."

"Writing of any experience, male or female, is difficult. One has to keep one's eyes and ears open and then delve into the imagination."

"(Do think of your work as political?) O'BRIEN: Well, everything is political: one's upbringing, the culture in which one grows up, even religion is political, whether we like it or not. Religion is supposed to be spiritual but we all know it isn't."

"[A novel] has a right and a duty to ask very painful and difficult questions. It doesn't solve them, but it asks them. (1995)"

"I never write about simple, gentle things, and I never will. It's not being sensational. I hate sensational books. Unless we look at dark and covered painful wounds, we can never heal them. (1995)"

"I don't think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it's like a dance I couldn't learn."

"one of the things about writing is that each book is a beginning. Each book is another hurdle up the ladder or up the mountain of one's country and one's own sensibility."

"What literature does, if it's any good, is to open the soul, the mind, the psyche and the body of a reader. I'm always looking for that - and in some cases getting into trouble for even attempting it."

"I suppose the themes we choose - because there are many stories I could have chosen to write about, but I chose this one - are as much about us, the writer, as about the story. You have to live a story. You have to take it in and stay with it and hopefully bring it back out"

"What has happened (it's funny, but it's also very serious) is that language is used now to cover up language is used as a deception, in every country, in every area, whereas great language and the imperative of great language is truth."

"A work of art has a big space. If for a moment we think of something else - and I won't dodge the question of Picasso's 'Guernica', or Pieter Bruegel's 'Hunters' - they're huge canvasses in which everything is allowed. Everything is painted in, everything is depicted, so that the viewer enters the whole world of that story or that tragedy, or that war or that hunt. It is quite different — and must be — to reportage."

"Literature and spirituality are very close. It doesn't matter if there's erotica in the book, or if there is very vivid description, or if there's hatred in the book. I think God and the gods watch over the writer or poet who for the duration of the writing is kind of blessed, is in a spell - not in a happy spell and not in a sweet or calm one, but to stir up that part of the mind, to find knowledge and words and narrative that one did not know one had, is a mystery. And having been brought up very religiously, I ascribe that mystery to God. The Greeks ascribed it to 'the gods'. But whether it's singular or plural, it is an energy, a force outside oneself, that comes to cause this stuff."

"(Do you have to cultivate a distance between you and your friends to have space to write?) O'BRIEN: Yes. One must live the inner life to the utmost. Samuel Beckett wrote a preface to a book of Jack Yeats's paintings, and he said: "the artist who stakes his being comes from nowhere. And he has no brothers." Well, of course, he does come from somewhere and that somewhere informs and permeates the work as it did for Samuel Beckett and it did for Jack Yeats, but solitary is how an artist has to be. It's crucial to the work. And painful for the life!"

"That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open."

"She said the reason that love is so painful is that it always amounts to two people wanting more than two people can give."

"It is not that you have to be happy-that would be asking too much-but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it the generosity so necessary to create. (1984)"

"[On the banning of (her then) four novels in Ireland] I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing. We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it's by abrasion that people's prejudices are aroused."

"All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people."

"It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence."

"Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. (Vogue, April 1985)"

"County Clare inhabits my thoughts and my writing wherever I happen to be. Ireland is always speaking a story and I have to search for it. (Is it always familiar territory?) O'BRIEN: Yes and no. With each book I hope to dig deeper. That is all I ask."

"I waked quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I awaken easily, and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason: he had not come home, my father."

"Bash on regardless. That is the cry dear chap. Through the funerals of friends. Trampling the rose gardens of enemies. Bash on regardless."

"We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable."

"But damn it all, aren't we just as some great playwright or someone said, actors on a stage."

"My god, one can see such a different side of people when one's merely a menial. O God what utter amazing ruddy bliss to no longer be a menial."

"To a blonde tweedy lady I had to administer a few I beg your pardons before she would await her turn. When a red nosed tinkerish looking Jarvey with a rather scrawny mare pulled up. In my most gentlemanly fashion I ushered these three older country people just behind to proceed ahead of me. But they nodded in eight directions and looked up at the sky in four more as if asking every saint in heaven for assistance and then urged me with their country voices to take the horsecab. "Ah, it's soon enough later for the likes of us.""

"The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed."

"There's nothing like obstacle to make a writer"

"Interesting that in times of terror, when the boom is to be lowered, people you hire to save you trouble and trembling think instantly of their own skins. As things come out of the void to get you. Bullets, buses, trucks, germs."

"Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more."

"Rid the mind of knowledge when looking for pleasure. Or start thinking and find a lot of pain."

"Of the eighty thousand things that came all at once into my mind to say, I selected the one hundred and twelfth."

"On Being Old. It's not nice but take comfort that you won't stay that way for ever."

"By all means come in, Kenneth." "Some place. What holds it up?" "Faith."

"Reach over and press this buzzer for action. A young man's raw face flicked around the door. "Good morning, Mr. Dangerfield." "A fine spring morning, a double and some Woodbines." "Certainly, sir. Early today?" "Little business to attend to." "It's always business isn't it." "O aye." Some fine cliches there. Should be encouraged. Too many damn people trying to be different. Coining phrases when a good platitude would do and save anxiety."

"Never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty."

"I think I am at a cross roads. And which way I turn may indeed be the direction of my whole destiny." "Ah you are far too young to speak so. Life it comes. Bang. It knocks you a little this way. Bang. It knock you a little bit the other way. And the direction you go. Well you are lucky if it is not backwards." "Or bang, it could madam, flatten one altogether." "Yes, it does do that too. But then we must get up again."

"Four o'clock on this oblong Tuesday, Sebastian pushing through the door of a secret public house, moved cautiously to an empty space at the bar. Bartender suspiciously approaching him. "I want a triple Irish, Gold Label. Quickly please." "Sir, I'm afraid I can't serve you." "You what?" "Can't serve you, sir, rules of the house, you've had enough to drink." "I've had enough to drink? What on earth do you mean?" "I think, sir, you've had sufficient unto your needs now. I think you've had enough now." "This is contemptible." "Peacefully sir, now. Keep the peace. When you're sober, sir, now, be very glad to serve you. Little sleep. You'll be fine." "Frightful outrage. Are you sure you're not drunk yourself?" "Now sir, a place and time for everything." "Well for Jesus sake." Sebastian turned from the bar pushed out through the door and along the street. In dazed condition."

"A change of scene is good for a change of mind."

"Foxy said the whole country was night and day asking God for favours. And you'd never get a chance to slip your own in. Especially if they had any old uncles or aunts to die to leave them a bit of land, they'd say dear Jesus would you ever strike the fuckers dead."

"Takes two to congress."

"I'm suspicious about people interested in saving other people's souls."

"What the hell have I got to show for all the time I've been over here? Nothing. And it's because of people like you. The Irish are all the same wherever they go. Faces compressed into masks of suffering. Complaining and excuses. And the Irish rasping, squabbling and bickering. Hear me? I'm sick of it. I hate it. I thought you got places where you learned to be an electrician. Good steady job. Good money. Have kids. I don't want kids. I don't want to be sucked down. And listen to some priested mick saying this is the second Sunday after Pentecost, there will be a communion breakfast next Sunday, and I want to see you all put a dollar in the basket. And every time I get a chance to get out of it, something screws me."

"Darcy Dancer crossing the frosty cobbles of the farmyard. Snorts and stampings in the stables. The whinnies of Molly and Petunia. Who smell me near. Luke mucking out. Forking up the big brown lumps of dung matted with yellow straw and shovelling it into his barrow. At least someone is working. But I suppose I shall have to spout a few hackneyed words to pass the time of day. "Good morning to you sir. It's grand to see you up and about." "Thank you Luke. It's a chilly draughty old morning." "'Tis that sir." "Gives one a mind to thank god for inventing fire." "Ah now you've said it, sir. On these winter days you need the little bit of hell the Lord puts flaming in a grate.""

"Newsboys on the street corners shouting out Herald and Mail. Their tattered jackets too small and their white naked legs and blue white feet on the wet blocks of granite, phlegm streaming from their noses. The evening herd of cold pinched dark coated figures waiting to cross at the pavement's edge, their breath making steam from their mouths. The strange purple of the sky. A ship hooting on the river. Great stacks of barrels quayside being loaded by a ship's derrick under lights. And bouncing on the cobbles, clattering huge carts tugged by massive horses. Followed here and there by impatient automobiles. Must be sadness where so many of the lower orders live inside the big broken windows. Behind these mournful unloved walls."

"They say there is good in everyone. If you just give them a chance. And a good boot in the arse."

"The one who leads the hunt gets no splatter."