Kevin Barry Quotes

#1. Vivien approached her husband, and embraced him, and planted a light kiss on his neck as they held each other against the darkness. Then she bit him on the neck. Blood came in great, angry spurts. I vomited, briefly, and decided to put on some music.

Kevin Barry

#2. I was a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Limerick city, and I used to cover the district court meetings. All of life passed through the Limerick courthouse. Misery, malevolence, the dark side of humanity ... I tell ya, it made 'Angela's Ashes' look like 'The Wonderful World of Disney.'

Kevin Barry

#3. I was freelancing for years in Cork and around. I also wrote freelance pieces for 'The Irish Times.'

Kevin Barry

#4. There's no mistaking the fact that some of the best longform fiction out there now is in American television. 'The Wire' and 'Deadwood' and 'The Sopranos.'

Kevin Barry

#5. I like to be happy when I'm writing. If not, then how will the reader manage?

Kevin Barry

#6. Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses.

Kevin Barry

#7. Half the time, in this life, you wouldn't know where you are nor when. There are moments of unpleasant liveliness. Tamp that the fuck down is best.

Kevin Barry

#8. He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn't want to sound too French about it.

Kevin Barry

#9. Libraries are where we learn that we can live our lives through books.

Kevin Barry

#10. When you wake up, instead of checking emails on your phone, or counting your retweets, pick up a pen and scratch a few sentences into a notebook.

Kevin Barry

#11. I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way - late at night, maybe, after I'd peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

Kevin Barry

#12. Wisps of steam like spectral maggots rose from their damp coats in the inn's fuggyheat

Kevin Barry

#13. It was quite risky to open the book with one of my quieter stories; I'm kind of trying, I think, to lure readers into a false sense of security and then assault them with a couple really loud, really strange stories.

Kevin Barry

#14. I've had lots of people saying very nice things about the work. But I genuinely feel in the course of a writing career you're going to have people say very nice things and some not-so-nice things, and if at all possible you should try to ignore both.

Kevin Barry

#15. I think the language as spoken in Limerick and Cork has not really been written; 'City of Bohane' is a combination of the two. Bohane is a little kingdom. When I began writing it, I realised that it was in the future and that it was a place that didn't care about anything that happened outside it.

Kevin Barry

#16. I wanted to write about Jews in Montana, so I went there by plane and bus, only to discover that there are no Jews in Montana. It didn't deter me.

Kevin Barry

#17. 'City of Bohane' has been optioned for film, and I've finished a first draft of the script.

Kevin Barry

#18. Get up, groan, write a bit, moan, eat breakfast, write some more, cycle my bike through the Sligo hills, make up country songs as I pedal along, sing them, have lunch, have a nap, groan, moan, write a small bit more, cook dinner, feed wifey, open a bottle, or several, slump, sleep.

Kevin Barry

#19. I have been as influenced by music and films as by books.

Kevin Barry

#20. What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.

Kevin Barry

#21. Oh give us a grim Tuesday of December, with the hardwind taking schleps at our heads, and the rain coming slantways off that hideous fucking ocean, and the grapes nearly frozen off us, and dirty ice caked up top of the puddles, and we are not happy, exactly, but satisfied in our despair.

Kevin Barry

#22. In the caravan in the farmyard outside Gort I knew for sure there was no God but there was surely a devil.

Kevin Barry

#23. Very first thing in the morning, I spew some rough genius directly on to the laptop. Then I have coffee and rewrite for three hours.

Kevin Barry

#24. The fundamental human truth underpinning 'Ox Mountain Death Song' is that men so very often turn into their fathers. The way that everything gets passed down.

Kevin Barry

#25. It's about what you've got to put yourself through to make anything worthwhile. It's about going to the dark places and using what you find there.

Kevin Barry

#26. One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.

Kevin Barry

#27. I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.

Kevin Barry

#28. Frazzled and delirious, as I've just finished a new book of stories. I feel like Moses staggering down the mountainside with the tablets of stone.

Kevin Barry

#29. rabid tush patrol

Kevin Barry

#30. I don't quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability - that's the area of interest for me.

Kevin Barry

#31. I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.

Kevin Barry

#32. One might trouble one's dainty snout with a whiff of the taleggio displayed in an artisanal cheese shop, or take a saucer of jasmine tea and a knuckle of fennel-scented snuff at a counter of buffed Big Nothing granite. But there was a want in these ladies yet, and it was for the rude life of youth.

Kevin Barry

#33. He stops up - he's had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool.

Kevin Barry

#34. Tricky the paths a long love might follow, like the spiral down twists of a raindrop on a windowpane.

Kevin Barry

#35. Before forty, you think that exhaustion is something like a long-lasting hangover. But at forty you learn all about it. Even your passions exhaust you.

Kevin Barry

#36. In my very early days as a journalist, as a cub reporter on a local newspaper, I used to cover the district courthouse in Limerick city - all human life passed through that establishment, and my time there remains a source of inspiration.

Kevin Barry

#37. I greatly enjoyed working as a freelance journalist, because it gets you out of the house, and it gets you talking to people, but it wasn't satisfying all of my cravings, and I knew that I needed to work with the other side of my brain - the darker, murkier side!

Kevin Barry

#38. Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.

Kevin Barry

#39. It is nothing, to give one's life for Ireland. I'm not the first and maybe I won't be the last. What's my life compared with the cause?

Kevin Barry

#40. The short story is a very natural mode of storytelling; most stories can be told quickly. I always think of them as like a tightrope walk - every sentence is a step along the rope, and you can so easily misplace your step and break your neck.

Kevin Barry

#41. I go into my workroom seven mornings a week. There will only be one or two mornings a week where it seems to be going well, but to earn those days you have to go through slow, slodgy days where your mind feels like porridge.

Kevin Barry