Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.
Is it possible to be nostalgic about old fears?
London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh.
When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either.
To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it’s significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.
There are two types of people, you see. One type keep their heads straight, and look around as they walk. The others look up – at the tops of houses, at the eaves and the lintels and the roofs, which can tell you when they were built – and I’ve always done that.
There are so many characters whizzing around inside my head, it’s like Looney Tunes. But as soon as I’ve finished writing about them, I completely forget who they are.
The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character.
People are much more interesting than people realise.
Murderers will try to recall the sequence of events, they will remember exactly what they did just before and just after. But they can never remember the actual moment of killing. This is why they will always leave a clue.
He stood beneath the white tower, and looked up at it with that mournful expression which his face always carried in repose: for one moment he thought of climbing up its cracked and broken stone, and then from its summit screaming down at the silent city as a child might scream at a chained animal.
It is strange, is it not, how a person can adore one’s soul so much that they adore one’s body also?
Under the force of the imagination, nature itself is changed.
Bigotry does not consort easily with free trade.
The ordinary routines of life are never chronicled by the historian, but they make up almost the whole of experience.
The best years are when you know what you’re doing.
The world is a sea in which we all must surely drown.
I have liv’d long enough for others, like the Dog in the Wheel, and it is now the Season to begin for myself: I cannot change that Thing call’d Time, but I can alter its Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all.
No poet is ever completely lost. He has the secret of his childhood safe with him, like some secret cave in which he can kneel. And, when we read his poetry, we can join him there.
What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.