48 Quotes by Joseph O'Neill

I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.

It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.