Edna O'Brien Quotes

Even if nobody was listening to it, I'd still be making music.

Sometimes I think I am still that 5-year-old girl playing with her dogs in the yard. That's how I see myself.

I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives.

I think that we are all much closer to our childhood selves than we often think, so when we read about childhood, it can surprise us how immediate or moving it is, when perhaps those feelings are just there, waiting to be accessed all the time.

The tattoo on my wrist has the letters 'ES,' which stands for 'elephant shoe.' It's something I used to say when I was younger instead of 'I love you' and it reminds me to remain childlike at times and to not take myself too seriously.

When we used to watch some BBC kids' shows it felt like some of the presenters were parental figures, we wanted to be their cheeky uncles really, their fun uncles, and speak to them on their level.

I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry. I have a dog now, and I have to remember to walk him. When I write, that takes over and I can't do anything else. There's something exciting about that free fall, but then my life gets really screwed up. I've lost lots of relationships because of my having to ignore everything.

Maybe it's because it's connected to my childhood, or it's connected to the origins of what drove me creatively, but I feel like my life never makes more sense than when I'm in that process.

Being with a kid always takes you to being a kid somehow, and they really are showing me a childhood I might not have had in some way.

And what is Genius but finer love, a love impersonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds from within outward, whilst Talent goes from without inward.

I'm psychotically involved in every tiny little aspect. That's just the way I've been about everything my whole life.

Some of my greatest memories were on a little league field. We didn't even have any uniforms.

There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.

When I was six all I could think about was ding-dongs and yo-yos.

When you're a kid, if you watch 'The Jeffersons' with your family at seven o'clock, it seems like a natural phenomenon, like the sun setting. The universe is a strange, strange place when all of a sudden you can't use your glass with the Bionic Woman on it any more.

If I have an unusual gift, it's not that I draw particularly better than other people - I've never fooled myself about that. Rather it's that I remember things other people don't recall: the sounds and feelings and images - the emotional quality - of particular moments in childhood. Happily an essential part of myself - my dreaming life - still lives in the light of childhood.

In childhood we all have ... a far higher sensibility for April and April evenings - a heartache for them, which in riper years is gradually and irretrievably consoled.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be.

Childhood feels so permanent, like it's the entire world, and then one day it's over and you're shoveling wet dirt onto your father's coffin, stunned at the impermanence of everything.

When I choose material for an album all these songs I grew up with pour into my head.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

I look in the mirror through the eyes of the child that was me.

My urge to write is an urge not to self-expressionism but to self-transcendence. My work is both bigger and smaller than I am.

I took the stairs and felt like my childhood took the elevator.

I do know I'm a control freak.