Quote by Tony Hawks

“No genuine Irishman could relax in comfort and feel at home in a pub unless he was sitting in deep gloom on a hard…

— Flann O'Brien

“Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.”

— Thomas Cahill

“Dublin was an English city, one of the loveliest. The most Irish thing about it was the shifting drab flow of the poor people”

— Jan Morris

“Irish people have been leaving their homes in search of better lives for many, many years. We're very good at it.”

— Matthew Quick

“There was a certain untamed energy about the west of Ireland – full of tragedy and struggle, sown with the flesh of the departed.”

— Rhian J. Martin

“The behaviour of the English people I had run into was making it very difficult to nail down a theory that the reason my…

— Tony Hawks

“I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at…

— James Joyce

“A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn’t.”

— Kate Atkinson

I think there's something about the Irish experience - that we had to have a sense of humor or die.

— Frank McCourt

“But it was always thus with Irishmen. Never, since the start of the world, has one of them taken a woman's sensible advice when…

— Eddie Lenihan

“I feel more strongly with every recurring year that our country has no tradition which does it so much honour and which it should…

— James Joyce

“Our national poet WB Yeats said that every Irish writer had a decision to take: whether to express Ireland or exploit it. In his…

— Declan Kiberd