Irish Literature Quotes

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ----Introibo ad altare Dei.

Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Dublin's a great place. It really is. It's a great place. And Ireland, especially, is a great place. I've realized that growing up more. I'm loving my country more as I'm getting older.

Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.

Every publisher or agent I've ever met told me the same thing - that Irish readers don't want to read about the bad old days of the Troubles; neither do the English and Americans - they only want to read about the Ireland of The Quiet Man, when red-haired widows are riding bicycles and everyone else is on a horse.

I've played Beckett. I put on in the 1950s the first Australian production of 'Waiting for Godot.' I played Estragon. The most interesting conversation I've had about Beckett was with a Dublin taxi driver.

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the 'Take Me to Church' EP.

I first came across 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' in college, with other anthologized poems by Yeats.

Today I am so at home in Dublin, more than in any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. But, as with Belfast it took me years to penetrate its outer ugliness and dourness, so with Dublin it took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

People who think I have insulted Ireland or Limerick or my family have not read the book!

I think there is a very strong sense of Irish identity, and I think partly that's to do with the fact that we have evolved differently from Britain and other countries in Europe.

My two great heroes are W. B. Yeats and Federico García Lorca.

Sometimes the archaism of the language when it's spoken is why we are all in love with the Irish today.

I was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and it is still home to me. My writing has taken me all over the world, but this is the place I come back to and the place where I find it easiest to write.

When I was starting to write, the great influence was T.S. Eliot and after that William Butler Yeats.

I used to carry a copy of Ulysses with me everywhere just in case I was knocked down by a bus. It seemed more important than having clean underwear.

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

Oh Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove!

Being Irish, I always had this love of words.

I love the fact that Inuit poetry may resonate with me as much as Irish.

Frank McCourt is a great guy.

William Maxwell's my favorite North American writer, I think. And an Irish writer who used to write for 'The New Yorker' called Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin, another Irish writer. There were a lot of writers that I found in 'The New Yorker' in the Fifties who wrote about the same type of material I did - about emotions and places.