"As regards drink, I can only say that in Dublin during the Depression when I was growing up, drunkenness was not regarded as a social disgrace. To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory."

"Brendan described himself as a drinker with a writing problem, but what he really was a painter with a writing problem. No matter in what country of the globe he resided, or how many luminaries he met, the would always be a painter in his soul. If he had remained one for his livelihood, he could still be alive today."

"He was born an Englishman and remained one for years."

"It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody."

"Mother, they would praise my balls if I hung them high enough."

"...her perspective is women centered but not feminist: her works usually depict the traps of femininity rather than liberation."

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

"Edna O'Brien transforms the lives of Irish women into a liturgy of premonition, doom, and enigmatic redemption...For all O’Brien’s sacramental melancholy, she exudes a worldly passion for the moment. She seduces readers with her direct, piercing gaze and pleases with the rhythms of her storytelling diction. Most of these tales are set in a territory between human brutality and inexplicable salvation. O’Brien takes it all in—the small-mindedness, gossip, superstition, death of the spirit, and destruction of the body. Her characters dance on the edge of the grave, yet, perhaps because despair is for Catholics the only unpardonable sin, O’Brien often tosses them a mysterious line of absolution and hope."

"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"

"I believe in Kafka's maxim that literature, whether it be poetry or prose, is disturbing. It's many other things as well- it can be exciting; it can be an ecstasy; it can be, to use a modern word, it can be a trip. But the inner core of human existence is about disturbance and writing comes from conflict."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A lot of young writers send me books and they want to be published, 'to be famous, to be known'. That isn't the job. That comes later, if it comes at all. A writer has to love that vocation - and it is an extremely unbefriended and difficult vocation."

"Forests have always been used in stories down the centuries. The forest is life - there's beauty, there's danger, there's threats, and, at the same time, potential safety. So without wanting to sound too pompous, I suppose a forest is a metaphor."

"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."

"(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!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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)"

"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)"

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

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

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

"[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)"

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"She has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse."

"Certainly I admire Edna O'Brien's work greatly. It would be difficult for any Irish woman writer to ignore the impact of her work during the repressive Ireland of the 1960s."

"The knack of living — how skilfully it kills!"

"Leviathan learning to overcome time"

"...letters of a burning book dance in flame not every time and not every time literally."

"...nothing else left but to watch eternity breaking up into human splinters."

""Women don't survive here," a woman of eighty said."

"The century has started with the crime of the century."

"Once a century the world is divided into before and after."

"Europe is shrinking, but America is broadening."

"What shall we do after we learn what we'll do: that is the question."