Patrick Kavanagh

My chin is weak. I find it hard to make decisions. For years I had been caught between the two stools of…

— Patrick Kavanagh

The keynote of simple folk is bad manners, familiarity. They intrude on one's private soul.

— Patrick Kavanagh

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not…

— Patrick Kavanagh

I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the…

— Patrick Kavanagh

Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness.…

— Patrick Kavanagh

How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his…

— Patrick Kavanagh

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this…

— Patrick Kavanagh

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

— Patrick Kavanagh

Publication there [in Nimbus] was to prove a turning point… The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty…

— Patrick Kavanagh

“It often occurs to me that we love most what makes us miserable. In my opinion, the damned are damned because they…

— Patrick Kavanagh

Ancient Ireland sweeping In again with all its unbaptized beauty: The calm evening, The whitethorn blossoms, The smell from ditches that were…

— Patrick Kavanagh

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins…

— Patrick Kavanagh

In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively…

— Patrick Kavanagh

In the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was in my prime as a film critic, the industry was booming. Hollywood,…

— Patrick Kavanagh

Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.

— Patrick Kavanagh

The second-grade films - where are they? No more are they made, and yet they were by far the best films for…

— Patrick Kavanagh

“Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. A provincial is always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-sufficient.”

— Patrick Kavanagh

“A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes and finds that it is his life”

— Patrick Kavanagh

Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be…

— Patrick Kavanagh

“Among your earthiest words, the angels stray...”

— Patrick Kavanagh

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

— Patrick Kavanagh

There is nothing as dead and as damned as an important thing. The things that really matter are casual, insignificant little things.

— Patrick Kavanagh

I dabbled in verse and it became my life

— Patrick Kavanagh

The bicycles go by in twos and threes - There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night, And there's the half-talk code…

— Patrick Kavanagh

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the…

— Patrick Kavanagh