It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory.
That you, sister. May you be the mother of a bishop.
I’m a drinker with a writing problem.
When I’m talking to people I like to stop and quote myself. My quotes have a way of spicing up conversation.
I ruined my health drinking to other people’s.
Nothing hurts more than the friendly letter that one never got around to writing.
God forgive us-but most of us grew up to be the sort of men our mothers warned us against.
Many a man has decided to stay alive not because of the will to live but because of the determination not to give assorted surviving bastards the satisfaction of his death.
Prostitutes, more than any other profession, help keep American marriages together.
There is no human situation so miserable that it cannot be made worse by the presence of a policeman.
Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn’t affect the theater, but two Yom Kippurs would ruin it.
I never felt so much at home as I do in New York. I must be a devil.
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
What’s a crook, only a businessman without a shop.
Bless you, sister. May all your sons be Bishops.
Compliments pass when the quality meet.
But the best book I ever saw in the nick was the Bible. When I was in Brixton on remand, I ’ad one in the flowery. Smashing thin paper for rolling dog-ends in. I must ’ave smoked my way through the book of Genesis, before I went to court.
I didn’t spend a lifetime studying theology, but I know that the Church was always against Ireland and for the British Empire.
He was a dark man, not very old, and very hard in an English way that tries to be dignified and a member of a master race that would burn a black man alive or put a pregnant woman out the side of the road in the interests of stern duty.
If I was willing to serve Mass, it was in memory of my ancestors standing around a rock, in a lonely glen, for fear of the landlords and their yeomen, or sneaking through a back-lane in Dublin, and giving the pass-word, to hear Mass in a slum public-house, when a priest’s head was worth five pounds and an Irish Catholic had no existence in law.