George A. Moore
Published among his notable works, Confessions of a Young Man stands as one of the identified titles associated with George Moore, an Irish writer who worked across an unusually wide range of forms during a career spanning more than five decades.
Born on 24 February 1852 in Ballyglass, Moore was an Irish citizen who originally wanted to be a painter. During the 1870s he pursued that ambition in Paris, receiving formal training at the Académie Julian. He went on to work as a novelist, poet, dramatist, playwright, art critic, art historian, and screenwriter, producing output in the English language across literary, critical, and dramatic fields throughout his life.
As a novelist and poet, Moore contributed to English-language writing over several decades. His work as a dramatist and playwright extended his activity beyond prose fiction, while his engagement with art criticism and art history drew on the visual arts education he had undertaken as a young man in France. The breadth of his output placed him across a range of overlapping literary and critical concerns during his lifetime.
Moore continued working as a writer until late in his life. Confessions of a Young Man remains the identified notable work associated with his name in the available record. He died on 21 January 1933 in Pimlico, having moved from the studios of the Académie Julian in Paris to an extensive body of writing that encompassed fiction, verse, drama, criticism, and art history.
Quotes by George A. Moore
You will find in me a middle aged man with a career behind me sufficiently brilliant to enable me to talk about many things interestingly; and I am not an unkindly soul, I believe.
Isn't it strange that religious prejudices - beliefs none possess, not even the saints, so they have lamented - divide brothers and sons from their fathers. You see, I except mothers and sisters; the female is not a religious animal. If she were, the world would have ceased long ago.
I do not believe in a universal religion any more than I believe in a universal language. My feeling is that people have to make their own religion as they have to make their arts and their parishes, and that they must find their own salvation; the salvation mongers are of not much avail.
An idea has been running in my head that books lose and gain qualities in the course of time, and I have worried over it a good deal, for what seemed to be a paradox, I felt to be a truth.
Everybody sets out to do something, and everybody does something, but no one does what he sets out to do.
I have written 30,000 words in a month - think of it - 30,000! I hope I am putting the right number of naughts: an average of a thousand words a day! For thirty days!
The right I claim is that of every human being to speak what he believes to be the truth to whomever he may meet on his way.
'The Dublin Magazine' has been edited with good taste, and it is very agreeable reading, but to speak quite candidly, I do not believe in the future of any literary journal any more than I believe in the future of the Trinity.
To what better purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resuscitation of his country's language?