Frank Delaney

“'The Great Gatsby,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.”

“I write - and then I write some more.”

“Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, that's how the human race goes forward. And if it's too late for children, there's the companionship of a safe and trusted person.”

“First a piece of Irish wisdom: you should always listen to a bookie. For they have a saying, 'Money tells a good story,' and somewhere in their odds is a kind of science-fiction existentialism that decrees that we, the people, know everything. In other words, betting patterns often make for good, unconscious soothsaying.”

“Marriage is the gold standard of all relationships. It's the currency by which everything is valued.”

“Every pain is a lesson.”

“Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.”

“To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.”

“Writers have opinions - that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.”

“When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.”

“As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.”

“Storytelling, in print or speech, needs vital energy.”

“The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness.”

“Kitchens are for conversation. They're not just for cooking; they're for conversations.”

“I'd have to struggle to find a subject in which I can't get some kind of interested pulse started.”

“For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.”

“If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.”

“We all belong to an ancient identity. Stories are the rivers that take us there.”

“If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.”

“If you have a book, you have a friend.”