We had gone out there to pass the beautiful day of high summer like true Irishmen - locked in the dark Snug of a public house.

New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment... a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.

The most important things to do in the world are to get something to eat, something to drink and somebody to love you.

It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.

They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues.

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

I only take a drink on two occasions - when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.

I was court-martialled in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.

The only thing I envy in young people is their livers.

Reasoning with a drunkard is likeGoing under water with a torch to seek for a drowning man.

It takes discipline to turn illusion into reality.

I'm Crusty, " he said, with a tartar-yellow smile.I resisted the urge to say, Yes, you are.

Life is contentment not a competition.

Love for God is the farthest reach of all stations, the sun of the highest degrees, and there is no station after that of love, except its fruit and its consequences.

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

The film Black Hawk Down paints the Somali people as wild savages.

Happiness in the present is only shattered by comparison with the past.[only if the past was better...if it was worse then you feel good that life is getting better]

I absolutely love Italian food. So pizza - like a margherita pizza, penne arbiota, a glass of wine. That's like my dream.

If you stare at an object, as you do when you paint, there is no point at which you stop learning things from it.