 A man's errors are his portals of discovery. |
| You forget that the kingdom of heaven suffers violence: and the kingdom of heaven is like a woman. |
| Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow. |
| Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home. |
| Your battles inspired me - not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead. |
| I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction. |
| If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European. |
| Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse and friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse. |
| A corpse is meat gone bad. Well and what's cheese? Corpse of milk. |
| The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts. |
| When I die Dublin will be written in my heart. |
| My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions. |
| Mistakes are the portals of discovery. |
| The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. |
| Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America. |
| Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why. |
| No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination. |
| Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize. |
| A nation is the same people living in the same place. |
| There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being. |
