Quotes from Flann O'Brien

When money's tight and is hard to get And your horse has also ran, When all you have is a heap of debt A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings.

Answers do not matter so much as questions, said the Good Fairy. A good question is very hard to answer. The better the question the harder the answer. There is no answer at all to a very good question.

Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.

Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first. 'If you follow them', said the Sergeant, 'you will save your soul and never get a fall on a slippery road.

It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter.

Never before had I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I knew also that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare. For convenience I called him Joe. I felt a little reassured to know that I was not altogether alone. Joe was helping me.

Well-known, alas, is the case of the poor German who was very fond of three and who made each aspect of his life a thing of triads. He went home one evening and drank three cups of tea with three lumps of sugar in each cup, cut his jugular with a razor three times and scrawled with a dying hand on a picture of his wife good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.

Is it about a bicycle?

Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man. Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I subsequently became addicted to brown stout in bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.

Past humanity is not only implicit in each new man born but is contained in him. Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring. All humanity from its beginning to its end is already present but the beam has not yet played beyond you.

A pint of plain is your only man.

Why should anyone steal a watch when he could steal a bicycle?

The first beginnings of wisdom...is to ask questions but never to answer any.

Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.

The dusk was performing its customary intransitive operation of "gathering".

When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

A woman doesn't care if she hasn't a stomach, provided she looks as if she hasn't.