Quotes from Hugo Hamilton

Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

Maybe you have to live under cover for a while before you can find your true character.

One day, my father said there was nothing outside infinity. He said the universe was like a cardboard box with God sitting outside surrounded by light, but I wanted to know if maybe God was sitting inside another cardboard box with the light on, and how could anyone be sure how many cardboard boxes there are.

Nobody can force you to smile, she says. -What? I ask. But I know she's not even talking to me, only to herself, as if she's the last person left in the room. -They can make you show your teeth, but what good is that? Nobody can make you smile against your will.

You have to measure everything twice because you can only cut once.

My father also likes to slam the front door from time

If it's the two men in suits with Bibles then he slams it shut to make sure not even one of their words enters into the hall.

Dead people have the best conversations of all. Lots of people don't really speak until they're dead, because only then can they say all the things to each other in the graveyard that they have been keeping a secret all their lives.

They speak like that because they're afraid of the Irish language coming back and killing everybody in the country this time. He [my father] says Irish people drink too much and talk too much and don't want to speak Irish, because it stinks of poverty and dead people left lying in the fields. That's why they speak posh English and pretend that nothing ever happened.

My father talks about people dying on coffin ships going to America and my mother talks about people dying on trains going to Poland. My father says our people died in the famine and my mother says those who died under the Nazis are our people, too. Everybody has things they can't forget.

some art commentators have described as the inner despair of a world laughing at its own misfortune.

Books have a way of dwelling like parasites, carried forth in the minds of readers, turning up by force of succession in later works of art. I was part of that living chain of ideas reaching into the future.

There is a weakness in the people after the war. They are open to slogans. The boundaries between fact and fiction have become so dissolved it's hard to tell the difference. As if people have now developed an appetite for dishonesty. The lies they like to hear. Rogue words to match their resentment. They want the blame for their losses to be placed on the vulnerable, the unwelcome, those from elsewhere.

kind of impartial reporting in the media that gives falsehood equal billing. The balanced view. This is the era of distortion, when everything can be instantly refuted. A numbness has entered the vocabulary. All information has become unstable, as though everything contains an equal opposite. If something is said to be safe, then it must also be implied unsafe. The lie appeals to your fears. The truth is too much trouble.

denounced in a summary trial, the name called out, giving a reason why they no longer fitted into the national vision, before their books were committed to the fire. All this was being broadcast by radio around the nation.

woman's voice was heard saying—beautiful time, beautiful time. What did she mean? Rejoicing at this new anti-intellectual age in which you could stop thinking, when you no longer had to find out anything you didn't already agree with?

casualties were to be taken out of the public domain because they were deemed bad for morale and they put people off war, encouraging a poor attitude toward death and suffering.

book doesn't want pity. Literature is a long game. There is no shame in living among the discarded. Obscurity can have its vivifying air, one of my author's successors liked to say.

My father was a schoolteacher once before he became an engineer and breac is a word, he explains, that the Irish people brought with them when they were crossing over into the English language. It means speckled, dappled, flecked, spotted, coloured. A trout is brack and so is a speckled horse. A barm brack is a loaf of bread with raisins in it and was borrowed from the Irish words bairín breac. So we are the speckled-Irish, the brack-Irish. Brack home-made Irish bread with German raisins.

We are the brack children. Brack, homemade Irish bread with German raisins. We are the brack people and we don't just have one briefcase. We don't just have one language and one history.

dream in Irish. We laugh in Irish and we cry in German. We are silent in German and we speak in English. We are the speckled people.

While he managed to escape, they remain burdened by the history of their once colonized country, by the theft of the landscape on which their ancestors walked. The ground beneath their feet did not belong to them until they achieved independence in 1960, fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. The country had been plundered, some of its most precious works of art taken to museums in London and never returned. The people themselves were stolen to be sold as slaves.