Joseph O'Neill Quotes

16 quotes in 262 categories

• It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing…
• 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…
• I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the…
• Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
• 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…
• New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.
• Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
• I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.
• Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.
• 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.
• 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…
• I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.
• Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
• 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…
• You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
• It takes a long, long time to write what I do write.

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