SEAN O'FAOLAIN

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.

Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.

Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have to time for the pitiful.

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have to time for the pitiful.

Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.