Edna O'Brien Quotes

I have some women friends but I prefer men.

Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

To live with the work and the letters of James Joyce was an enormous privilege and a daunting education. Yes, I came to admire Joyce even more because he never ceased working, those words and the transubstantiation of words obsessed him. He was a broken man at the end of his life, unaware that Ulysses would be the number one book of the twentieth century and, for that matter, the twenty-first.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious.

Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

Wherever there were horses or ponies the mushrooms always sprang up.

... we have so many voices in us, how do we know which ones to obey?

There was always a real reason for everything - why spoons tarnished, and jam furred, and people declined into God, or drink, or card games.

Kindness. The most unkind thing of all.

Love . . . is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.

Irish Catholicism is very much founded on the stone of fear and of punishment.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

Ordinary life bypassed me, but I also bypassed it.

It couldn't have been any other way.Conventional life and conventional people are not for me.

In our deepest moments we say the most inadequate things. (Sister Imelda)

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.

Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read.

She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ's handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere.

I always want to be in love, always. It's like being a tuning fork.

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.

It is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.

All my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.

There are times when the thing we are seeing changes before our very eyes, and if it is a landscape we praise nature, and if it is celestial we invoke God, but if it is a loved one who defects, we excuse ourselves and say we have to be somewhere and are already late for our next appointment. We do not stay to put pennies over the half-dead eyes.

literature is the last banquet between minds.

August is a wicked month.

After that dark woman you search for someone who will fit into the irregular corners of your heart.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.

You have to be lonely to be a writer

For me to write I have to be, a, alone, and b, know that nobody is going to question me. I write the way a thief steals; it's a little covert.

When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.

Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.

I knew I had done something awful. I had killed love, before I even knew the enormity of what love meant.

Life, after all, was a secret with the self.

The more one gave out, the less there remained for the center--that center which she coveted for herself and recognized instantly in others. Fruits had it, the very heart of, say, a cherry, where the true worth and flavor lay. Some of course were flawed or hollow in there. Many, in fact.

If the Holy Communion touched my teeth, I thought that was a mortal sin

jealousy is the direct result of self-betrayal.

I am not kind, I cut people off as with shears and I drop them like nettles.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.

My hand does the work and I don't have to think;

in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.

I have always espoused chastity except when one can no longer resist the temptation.

I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life.

fear is a dreadful drawback because it stops us living in the moment.

It's not the vote women need, we should be armed.

We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable.

Oh, love, what an unreasoning creature it grew to be.

Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?

That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees.

Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

I'm a tuning fork, tense and twanging all the time.