Joseph O'Neill Quotes

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

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

Only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally industrious dummy stand-in who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all the others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own.

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.

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.

In a weekend-long lingual-legal rage, I composed a heartless, fearless, terrifying work of negation that burdened every person save myself with every conceivable responsibility and loss and risk, that in every instance unfairly and unlimitedly and gratuitously and disproportionately favored me at the expense of the world and, most repellently of all, that withheld the basic hospitality of writing: my disclaimer, as completed, was a graphic monstrosity, a cruelly rambling, almost agrammatical near-balderdash of baffling dependent clauses and ultra-boring, ultra-technical phraseology that enveloped the reader in a dingy, alien, almost unbreathable word-atmosphere offering barely a vent of punctuation, indentation, or line breakage.

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.

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

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.

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?

There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight.

You know what my motto is?'
I didn't think people had mottoes anymore,' I said.
Think fantastic,' Chuck said. 'My motto is, Think fantastic.

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

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.

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.

As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.

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

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.

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

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.

I felt above all, tired. Tiredness: if there ws a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness ... A banal state of affairs, yes-but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women's magazines.

She merely wiped the floor with paper towels and said nothing, brushing her free hand against my shoulder blade - my shoulder blade! - as she carried the soaked paper to the trash can, never holding me fast, refraining not out of lack of humanity but out of fear of being drawn into a request for further tenderness, a request that could only bring her face-to-face with some central revulsion, a revulsion of her husband or herself or both, a revulsion that had come from nowhere, or from her, or perhaps from something I'd done or failed to do, who knew, she didn't want to know, it was too great a disappointment, far better to get on with the chores, with the baby, with the work, far better to leave me to my own devices, as they say, to leave me to resign myself to certain motifs, to leave me to disappear guiltily into a hole of my own digging. When the time came to stop her from leaving, I did not know what to think or wish for, her husband who was now an abandoner, a hole-dweller, a leaver who had left her to fend for herself, as she said, who'd failed to provide her with the support and intimacy she needed, she complained, who was lacking some fundamental wherewithal, who no longer wanted her, who beneath his scrupulous marital motions was angry, whose sentiments had decayed into a mere sense of responsibility, a husband who, when she shouted, "I don't need to be provided for! I'm a lawyer! I make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year! I need to be loved!" had silently

I'm tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it's the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs and their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and, I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection that bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.

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.

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

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.

We were trying, as I irrelevantly analyzed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington

A self-evident and prefabricated symbolism attaches itself to this slow climb to the zenith, and we are not so foolishly ironic, or confident, as to miss the opportunity to glimpse significantly into the eyes of the other and share the thought that occurs to all at this summit, which is, of course, that they have made it thus far, to a point where they can see horizons previously unseen, and the old earth reveals itself newly. Everything is further heightened, as we must obscurely have planned, by signs of sundown.

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.

For those under the age of 45 it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment - or, if they hadn't, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer's arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers.

There was, apparently, a nuclear reactor at a place called Indian Point, just thirty miles away in Westchester County. If something bad happened there, we were constantly being informed, the 'radioactive debris', whatever this might be, was liable to rain down on us. (Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name.) Then there was the question of dirty bombs. Apparently any fool could build a dirty bomb and explode it in Manhattan. How likely was this? Nobody knew. Very little about anything seemed intelligible or certain, and New York itself - that ideal source of the metropolitan diversion that serves as a response to the largest futilities - took on a fearsome, monstrous nature whose reality might have befuddled Plato himself. We were trying, as I irreverently analysed it, to avoid what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a pre-apocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the thirties or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the Cold War inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow. In my anxiety I phoned Rachel's father, Charles Bolton, and asked him how he'd dealt with the threat of nuclear annihilation. I wanted to believe that this episode of history, like those old cataclysms that deposit a geologically telling layer of dust on the floors of seas, had sooted its survivors with special in

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

No, it was simply that I was uninterested in making, as I saw it, a Xerox of some old emotional state. I was in my mid-thirties, with a marriage more or less behind me. I was no longer vulnerable to curiosity's enormous momentum. I had nothing new to murmur to another on the subject of myself and not the smallest eagerness about being briefed on Danielle's supposedly unique trajectory - a curve described under the action, one could safely guess, of the usual material and maternal and soulful longings, a few thwarting tics of character, and luck good and bad. A life seemed like an old story.

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.

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

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