Quotes from Brendan Behan

It's a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on with.

An author's first duty is to let down his country.

In my childhood I could remember the whole week a damn sight better than I can now for all my family were in the Rising. And they told the stories to such good effect that I was in there with them… Now I have learned enough arithmetic to know that I could not possibly have taken part in an event which happened seven years before I was born, and it saddens me.

What's a crook, only a businessman without a shop.

If I was willing to serve Mass, it was in memory of my ancestors standing around a rock, in a lonely glen, for fear of the landlords and their yeomen, or sneaking through a back-lane in Dublin, and giving the pass-word, to hear Mass in a slum public-house, when a priest's head was worth five pounds and an Irish Catholic had no existence in law.

I didn't spend a lifetime studying theology, but I know that the Church was always against Ireland and for the British Empire.

Compliments pass when the quality meet.

He was a dark man, not very old, and very hard in an English way that tries to be dignified and a member of a master race that would burn a black man alive or put a pregnant woman out the side of the road in the interests of stern duty.

Don't speak of your Protestant minister, Nor of his church without meaning or faith, For the foundation stone of his temple Was the bollocks of Henry VIII Brendan Behan

I sat beside Charlie. Opposite us, in the Black Maria, was a red-haired boy of my own age, and a small man with a broken nose, a cauliflower ear, and a begrudging look. He was going up for kicking his wife. He was not unfriendly, and told me his name was Donohoe. I said that by a coincidence that was my mother's name. It was not her name, but civility costs nothing.

When two men fight over a woman it's the fight they want, not the woman.

I say myself no depressed words just depressed minds.

There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.

A Torontonian is a man who leaves culture to his wife.

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

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.

I am married to Beatrice Salkeld, a painter. We have no children, except me.

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

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops.

. . . 'twill turn your eyeballs black and blue.

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverance 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.

What the hell difference does it make left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

I think weddings are sadder than funerals, because they remind you of your own wedding. You can't be reminded of your own funeral because it hasn't happened. But weddings always make me cry.