Patrick Kavanagh

“Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.”

“There is nothing as dead and as damned as an important thing. The things that really matter are casual, insignificant little things.”

“The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.”

“In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.”

“In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled.”