Top 63 Roddy Doyle Quotes
#1. - It's gas but, isn't it? How we get suckered in. Some prick in a white coat says if you eat all o' your peas Gina Lollobrigida will sit on your face.
Roddy Doyle
#2. I'm going to sound like an old man but at my age, it's lovely doing something that you've never done before.
Roddy Doyle
#3. I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.
Roddy Doyle
#4. She'd tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty.
Roddy Doyle
#5. Dreaming was only nice while it lasted.
Roddy Doyle
#6. It's a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it is a dreary little dump most of the time.
Roddy Doyle
#7. The best way to reveal a character is to get them to open their mouths.
Roddy Doyle
#8. If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.
Roddy Doyle
#9. It often seemed that the trees were flu of people whispering
especially tonight.
Roddy Doyle
#10. When I was growing up, the exam system didn't allow you to write fiction, so you never did.
Roddy Doyle
#11. The problem with being Irish ... is having 'Riverdance' on your back. It's a burden at times.
Roddy Doyle
#12. I see people in terms of dialogue and I believe that people are their talk.
Roddy Doyle
#13. Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.
Roddy Doyle
#14. No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn't yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.
Roddy Doyle
#15. Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.
Roddy Doyle
#16. I wouldn't go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.
Roddy Doyle
#17. Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph, until you get to page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety - it's the job.
Roddy Doyle
#19. I do enjoy Gothic fiction or books about zombies if they are well written and I like vampires.
Roddy Doyle
#20. I was the ref. I was the ref they didn't know about. Deaf and dumb. Invisible as a wall. I wanted no one to win
Roddy Doyle
#21. It was frightening, though, how little time you got. You only became yourself when you were twenty-three or twenty-four. A few years later, you had an old man's chest hair. It wasn't worth it.
Roddy Doyle
#22. I don't work to any commissions. I do what I want to do.
Roddy Doyle
#23. She's happier than Nicola. That's probably true. Alcoholics can stop drinking but what is there for the children of alcoholics? Is it always too late? Probably. She doesn't know.
Roddy Doyle
#24. To claim that music is more important than oxygen would be trite and sentimental. It would also be true.
Roddy Doyle
#25. Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal.
Roddy Doyle
#26. Mary,' said her mother. 'We don't like sarcasm '
'You mightn't like it,' said Mary. 'But I love it.
Roddy Doyle
#27. I'm not recognised that much. I'm just a bald man in glasses and there's a rash of them in Dublin. It'd be different if I had a mohican.
Roddy Doyle
#28. We'll cry," she said. "An then we'll stop. Because it's only a house.
Roddy Doyle
#29. If you're from Dublin, for example, chances are you live with your family, if you're lucky enough to, right up to the mid-20s. And most of the people I know, when they finally sort of set off on their own, they don't stray all that far.
Roddy Doyle
#30. Schools don't really allow failure and yet it's part of any endeavour, not just writing.
Roddy Doyle
#31. He loved me and he beat me. I loved him and I took it. It's as simple as that, and as stupid and complicated. It's terrible. It's like knowing someone you love is dead but not having the body to prove it. He loved me. I know it.
Roddy Doyle
#32. We parked our bikes on verges so they could graze.
Roddy Doyle
#33. It's the only thing sexier than a sexy woman. A sexy woman cooking fuckin' sausages.
Roddy Doyle
#34. The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.
Roddy Doyle
#35. If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there's a hell, she's standing.
Roddy Doyle
#37. I swooned the first time I saw Charlo. I actually did. I didn't faint or fall on the floor but my legs went rubbery on me and I giggled. I suddenly knew that I had lungs because they were empty and collapsing.
Roddy Doyle
#38. One day at a time, sweet Jesus. Whoever wrote that one hadn't a clue. A day is a fuckin' eternity
Roddy Doyle
#39. When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.
Roddy Doyle
#40. They ran. They stayed warmer that way and running seemed to be the right way to measure their love for Uncle Ben. They wanted to hear their breath, and their feet stamping the ground. They wanted to feel their lungs working, and their hearts.
Roddy Doyle
#41. It's great meeting children because you never know what they will say.
Roddy Doyle
#42. When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'
Roddy Doyle
#43. They were joking, but it was a serious conversation. They were often like that, Mary and her granny, when they were alone together.
Roddy Doyle
#44. Do ghosts drink tea?
They don't, said Tansey. But this ghost would love to see a cup of tea in front of her. It'd be lovely.
Roddy Doyle
#45. I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.
Roddy Doyle
#46. She was in the book again and, by the time she got to page-turning time again, she'd forgetting I was there.
Roddy Doyle
#47. I've been asked why does Ireland produce so many great musicians, and the answer is it doesn't. When you count the great musicians Ireland has given the world in the last 20 years, you can do it on one hand.
Roddy Doyle
#48. If you were going to be best friends with anyone - Kevin - you had to hate a lot of other people, the two of you, together. It made you better friends.
Roddy Doyle
#49. And even the aches and pains that had joined her as she got older
she'd liked them. They were reminders
the back, the knee, the achy wrists
they were even friends: Feel that now, Emer. You're alive.
Roddy Doyle
#50. When you grow up on an island, what matters is how you stand to the sea.
Roddy Doyle
#52. She's a pot-of-tea-before-I-say-boo-to-you woman. There's always a pile of warm teabags in the sink when I come down, like what a horse would leave behind.
Roddy Doyle
#53. I had to make sure I kept an eye on the real world.
Roddy Doyle
#54. Sometimes, when you were thinking about something, trying to understand it, it opened up in your head without you expecting it to, like it was a soft spongy light unfolding, and you understood, it made sense forever ...
Roddy Doyle
#55. Most working days I can be at my desk for nine hours a day.
Roddy Doyle
#56. Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.
Roddy Doyle
#57. I jumped on Sinbad's bottle. Nothing happened. I didn't do it again. Sometimes when nothing happened it was really getting ready to happen
Roddy Doyle
#58. Jesus, she said. -Are you in there at all? -I am, Annie, I told her. -Bursting to get out.
Roddy Doyle
#59. Four generations of women
"I'm a woman," Mary said to herself
heading off on a journey in a car. One of the dead, one of them dying, one of the driving, one of them just staring out.
Roddy Doyle
#60. It's hard for me to measure them, or to assess my books because I'm so close to them.
Roddy Doyle
#61. My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.
Roddy Doyle
#62. Head in the book. Nose sliding down the valley between the pages.
Roddy Doyle
#63. It was a sign of growing up, when the dark made no more difference to you than the day.
Roddy Doyle
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