48 Quotes by Patrick Kavanagh

Parochialism and provincialism are direct opposites. A provincial is always trying to live by other people's loves, but a parochial is self-sufficient.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.