Quotes from Brendan Behan

If you accept your limitations you go beyond them.

A man is fortunate if he encounters living examples of vice, as well as of virtue, to inspire him.

God forgive us-but most of us grew up to be the sort of men our mothers warned us against.

The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of matress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted.

I ruined my health drinking to other people's.

I never felt so much at home as I do in New York. I must be a devil.

That you, sister. May you be the mother of a bishop.

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

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

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

I am a daylight atheist.

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

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

In a society which really supported marriage the wife would be encouraged to go to the office and make love to her husband on the company's time and with its blessing.

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.

I cannot imagine any crime worse than taking a life, can you? -It'd depend whose life.

All publicity is good, except an obituary notice.

A pedestrian ought to be legally allowed to toss at least one hand grenade at a motorist every day.

I wish I'd been a mixed infant.

I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

One drink is too many for me and a thousand not enough.

If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

I am a drinker with writing problems.