EDNA O'BRIEN

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.

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.

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?

I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

Death in its way comes just as much of a surprise as birth.

fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.

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's not the vote women need, we should be armed.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

August is a wicked month.

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it. It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

...people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.

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.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.