Quotes by Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“All writers are waiting for replies. Thats what Ive learned. Maybe all human beings are”

“Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.”

“It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort ...”

“You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.”

“When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these...”

“Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.”

“It's a blindness thing, faith.”

“We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.”

“If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like lif...”

“I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Je...”

“All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are”