Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last – as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted.

— Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O'Neill Quotes

Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for. I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy.

— Joseph O'Neill

Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last – as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted.

— Joseph O'Neill

Like an old door, ever man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.

— Joseph O'Neill

If what you want to do is write, then it’s madness not to do it.

— Joseph O'Neill

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

— Joseph O'Neill

It won’t be long before we’ll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

— Joseph O'Neill

You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.

— Joseph O'Neill

One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

— Joseph O'Neill

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That’s the way I do it, anyway.

— Joseph O'Neill

I’m completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I’ll be a happy man.

— Joseph O'Neill

I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.

— Joseph O'Neill

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that’s intimate. I love books where you feel you’re having a romance with the writer.

— Joseph O'Neill
Romance

Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.

— Joseph O'Neill

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

— Joseph O'Neill

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

— Joseph O'Neill

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

— Joseph O'Neill

Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you’re paying attention you’ll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

— Joseph O'Neill

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

— Joseph O'Neill

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?

— Joseph O'Neill
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