It was the only way to progress, to stop.
The only thing you must never speak of is your happiness.
You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.
What kind of country is this where a woman can’t weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!
We could have saved sixpence. We could have saved fivepence. But at what cost?
What is that unforgettable line?
Tears and laughter, they are so much Gaelic to me.
Better hope deferred than none.
Dublin university contains the cream of Ireland: Rich and thick.
Words are all we have.
To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.
And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.
To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail, that failure is his world and the shrink from desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living.
Words are the clothes thoughts wear.
The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.
James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can.
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
We all are born mad. Some remain so.
Let me go to hell, that’s all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.