117 Quotes by Edna O'Brien

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader.

Money talks, but tell me why all it says is just Goodbye.

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 had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

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.

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

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

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

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.