Joseph O Neill Quotes

#1. 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.

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

#4. If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.

Joseph O'Neill

#5. One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.

Joseph O'Neill

#6. It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows cast by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe ...

Joseph O'Neill

#7. Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.

Joseph O'Neill

#8. The yellow commuter train ran through canal-crossed fields as dull as graph paper. Always one saw evidence of the tiny brick houses that the incontinent municipalities, Voorschoten and Leidschendam and Rijswijk and Zoetermeer, pooped over the rural spaces surrounding The Hague.

Joseph O'Neill

#9. Even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.

Joseph O'Neill

#10. I am vertigiously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything wpold go to hell.

Joseph O'Neill

#11. It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.

Joseph O'Neill

#12. Like an old door, ever man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.

Joseph O'Neill

#13. I think if you're writing about cricket, you're obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer.

Joseph O'Neill

#14. 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?

Joseph O'Neill

#15. 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.

Joseph O'Neill

#16. 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.

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

#19. Bright-shirted racers of the Tour de France zoomed by like fantastically bicycling macaws.

Joseph O'Neill

#20. There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.

Joseph O'Neill

#21. The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.

Joseph O'Neill

#22. Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.

Joseph O'Neill

#23. You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.

Joseph O'Neill

#24. I am vertiginously reminded that the human race refreshes itself in absolute ignorance and that without an enormous, never-ending labor of pedagogy, everything would go to hell.

Joseph O'Neill

#25. After a couple of somehow frightening evenings over the course of which each of us was, there can be little doubt, impressed more and more powerfully by the mental illness of the other, we restricted our friendship to the stairs.

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

#27. It takes a long, long time to write what I do write.

Joseph O'Neill

#28. He now paid the allowance that permitted his son to live in frugal idleness.

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

#30. 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.

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

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

Joseph O'Neill

#33. 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.

Joseph O'Neill

#34. I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

Joseph O'Neill

#35. Hi. Thx for this. No idea. Sorry. L - , Your inquiry defeats me grammatically. Cheers.

Joseph O'Neill

#36. 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.

Joseph O'Neill

#37. 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.

Joseph O'Neill

#38. If you cannot point to a particular actual or imagined room, among the billions of rooms in the world, and state truthfully, Inside that room I will find joy - well, then you have found a useful measure of where you stand in the matter of joy. And in the matter of rooms, too.

Joseph O'Neill

#39. Each of her soothing utterances battered me more grievously than the last - as if I were traveling in a perverse ambulance whose function was to collect a healthy man and steadily damage him in readiness for the hospital at which a final and terrible injury would be inflicted.

Joseph O'Neill

#40. 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.

Joseph O'Neill