Quotes from Joseph O'Neill

I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again.

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you're writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.

I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.

I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.

Perhaps the relevant truth is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?

Despair busies one, and my weekend was spoken for. I was going to lie down on the floor of my apartment in the draft of the air conditioner and spend two days and nights traveling a circuit of regret, self-pity, and jealousy.

Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.

New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.

Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?

The word "Yankee" itself, I was informed, came from that simplest of Dutch names - Jan.

I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.

As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.

people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.

I felt above all, tired. Tiredness: if there ws a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness....A banal state of affairs, yes-but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women's magazines.

My instinct was to keep him at a distance, at that distance, certainly, that we introduce between ourselves and those we suspect of neediness.

bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws.

I see, I tell him, looking from him to Rachel and again to him. Then I turn to look for what it is we're supposed to be seeing.