Edna O'Brien

“The words ran away with me.”

“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.”

“I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.”

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”

“Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.”

“Writers are always anxious, always on the run--from the telephone, from responsibilities, from the distractions of the world.”

“It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded.”

“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.”

“Darkness is drawn to light, but light does not know it; light must absorb the darkness and therefore meet its own extinguishment.”

“Writing is like carrying a fetus.”

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

“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.”

“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?'”

“Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.”

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

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

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

“My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don’t know who my brother. In war I don’t know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.”

“I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.”