Quotes from Patrick Kavanagh

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

God cannot catch us. Unless we stay in the unconscious room. Of our hearts.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.

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.

It might be said that the pose of absolute honesty is the most dishonest one of all.

A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong.

I dabbled in verse and it became my life

Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.

The second-grade films - where are they? No more are they made, and yet they were by far the best films for holding hands at, and wasn't this always the main purpose of the cinema?

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.

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.

Publicity's a cancer. It eats out a man - till there's nothing but a shell left.

In the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was in my prime as a film critic, the industry was booming. Hollywood, to give them their due, always called it the industry, through quite a few imagined it as an art form and went through several hours regularly at tiresome films in the sacred cause of art.

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

It often occurs to me that we love most what makes us miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned.

There is nothing as dead and as damned as an important thing. The things that really matter are casual, insignificant little things.

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

Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.

In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.

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

Ay - 'The Green Fool' business, the libel action over the head of it - did me a lot of damage. It destroyed the momentum.

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

Undoubtedly, there are a number of well-developed, mainly female, stars helping Miss Taylor to hold the film industry together: Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, etc. But such an insistence on cheesecake smells of bankruptcy.