18 Quotes by Pete McCarthy

I like reading in a pub rather than a library or study, as it’s generally much easier to get a drink.

Where’s the incentive to be frugal with life’s pleasures, to save up the pages in your favourite book for later, if you’re going to be plunged into the darkened abyss at some arbitrary hour? If life is a book, then read it while you can. Don’t save up any pages for later, because there might not be one.

Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place where you’ve never lived, but your ancestors have? Or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgement fuddled by nostalgia, Guinness, and the romance of the diaspora?

Never pass a bar with your name on it.

I use the pay phone to call my friend Noel. The last time I was here he took me up a mountainside in Connemara with a seventy-eight-year-old poteen-maker who’d learned his craft as a teenager from his father. We spent the day watching him double-distill brown bog water in two oil drums over a turf fire into something that tasted like the finest malt. Noel acted as interpreter, as the old man spoke no English. Perhaps he’ll have another adventure in store for me this time.

If life is a book, then read it while you can.

There are huge creative advantages in having huge chunks of time when no one can find you. Emails and phones have diluted the experience of travel.

Mind you, he looks a bit out of it, gazing around in confusion, as if his sax player’s brain has been removed and replaced with a drummer’s.

I find myself thinking, and not for the first time, just how useful wilderness must be when it comes to burying a troublesome relative, or a complete stranger.