Patrick Kavanagh

“Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.”

“It might be said that the pose of absolute honesty is the most dishonest one of all.”

“How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life.”

“Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static.”

“What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true.”

“Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.”

“Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.”

“In the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was in my prime as a film critic, the industry was booming. Hollywood, to give them their due, always called it the industry, through quite a few imagined it as an art form and went through several hours regularly at tiresome films in the sacred cause of art.”

“The second-grade films - where are they? No more are they made, and yet they were by far the best films for holding hands at, and wasn't this always the main purpose of the cinema?”

“A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong.”

“I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin's life, the literary and artistic.”

“Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination.”

“Malice is only another name for mediocrity.”

“The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.”

“A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men.”

“The keynote of simple folk is bad manners, familiarity. They intrude on one's private soul.”

“Undoubtedly, there are a number of well-developed, mainly female, stars helping Miss Taylor to hold the film industry together: Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, etc. But such an insistence on cheesecake smells of bankruptcy.”

“Ay - 'The Green Fool' business, the libel action over the head of it - did me a lot of damage. It destroyed the momentum.”

“Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.”

“Publicity's a cancer. It eats out a man - till there's nothing but a shell left.”