70 quotes found
Author · Irish · 1945
Irish author (born 1945)
“When I look back all is flux, without beginning and flowing towards no end, or none that I shall experience, except as a final full stop. The items of flotsam that I choose to salvage from the gene...”
“Ian McEwan is a very good writer; the first half of Atonement alone would ensure him a lasting place in English letters.”
“Saturday is a dismayingly bad book. The numerous set pieces—brain operations, squash game, the encounters with Baxter, etc. — are hinged together with the subtlety of a child's Erector Set. The cha...”
“Saramago is … interesting, but I don't think I would put it higher than that … [he] ventures too far into the realm of 'magic realism' for my taste. Reality itself is magical enough without inventi...”
“If they give me the bloody prize, why can't they say nice things about me?”
“The white May blossom swooned slowly into the open mouth of the grave.”
“I would have failed, of course, but failure is the condition of the artist's life. What kind of failure would I have enjoyed, suffered? I know it was not all waste. My hopeless daubings taught me t...”
“[Julian Gough's] notion that shouting the word 'feck' – Father Ted has a lot to answer for – and being grossly scatological will make him seem echt Irish only harms his argument. We who were born a...”
“I'm a little surprised that commercial success has arrived. I used to think that it was hopeless, that it would never happen.”
“It's amazing what success will do. I've just started a new book after taking a break of a year and a half since finishing 'The Book of Evidence,' and I'm fascinated to see if I can detect in myself...”
“I could have kept [writing Irish novels such as Birchwood] and probably had a good deal more success than I did, especially on this side of the Atlantic. But you have to try to do many things. You ...”
“When I think back to then, from out of this sepulchral silence, I am aware of a ceaseless hubbub of voices loudly saying things no one seemed in the least inclined to listen to. It was the Age of S...”
“Ah, what heights of contempt I was capable of in those days! Now, in old age, I have largely lost that faculty, and I miss it, for it was passion of a sort.”
“I have always disliked the sea, its surliness, its menace, its vast reaches and unknowable, shudder-inducing depths.”
“Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves—idealised, you know, but still recognisable—and then spend our lives engages in the effort to make ourselves int...”
“But what comfort does belief offer, when it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in t...”
“I suspect that significant first encounters only take on their aura of significance in retrospect.”
“Man is only lovable in the multitude, and at a good distance.”
“I have tried to explain to her that the concept of bravery is entirely spurious. We are what we are, we do what we do.”
“I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really so occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest pa...”
