Kevin Barry Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.'

Would you say there's any end in sight, Charlie?

rabid tush patrol

The van stops on the coast road.

Ho-ho, Cornelius says.

Cornelius? Please. Let's just get to the fucking island.

Patience a small while.

Cornelius kills the engine. He climbs from the van. The wind comes harder now from the sea. He gestures for John to follow; he does. They walk the scalp of a hill together, descending.

You're not to be afraid, John.

They approach a great fall-away to the sea; far below, it flashes its green teeth, the ever-welcoming sea.

Right, Cornelius says.

He steps up to the edge; the fall is sheer - it's a great distance to fall and to a certain ending there.

Come on, John.

He steps with Cornelius to the edge of the sheer fall; the wind pulses hard against them.

Lean into it, Cornelius says. Like so.

He does and he is held there.

Fucking hell. . .

Be fierce, John.

The wind comes hard and Cornelius leans in closer again to its great force; he is held there.

Cornelius?

Now, John.

John tips his toes up close to the edge and closer again to the sheer fall and closer.

Cornelius?

Go on.

He leans over the edge and the wind holds him perfectly there.

Do you see, John?

Maybe.

Do you see the trick of it, John?

I think so.

No fear.

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.

At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews - Saul Bellow, Philip Roth - which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn't work out very well, as you can imagine.

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

The days were cold as evil but the evenings spread magic from the sea inwards and stretched out and tapped the place until it was open to our dreaming.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Never name the moment for happiness or it will pass by.

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

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.

It was Dominick Gleeson, aka Big Dom, editor of the city's only newspaper, the Bohane Vindicator. Of course, it was in no small part thanks to Logan Hartnett that the Vindicator remained the city's only newspaper. Its masthead solgan: 'Truth or Vengeance', as inked above a motif of two quarrelling ravens.

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.

It was one of those summers you're nostalgic for even before it passes. Pale, bled skies. Thunderstorms in the night. Sour-smelling dawns. It brought temptation, and yearning, and ache – these are the summer things.

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

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.'

In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, 'See this kid? He'll kill.'

The Past is uncertain, mobile. It shifts and rearranges back there yet.

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.

I remember, as a child, a particular groan that my father would sound when he crawled from the bed in the morning. I hear the same groan now, precisely, every morning, when I emerge from my own lair. It's more than an expression of physical weariness - it's an aching of the soul. Even the groans get passed down.

When we move by water, our hearts are moved. We are complicated fucking machines.

A troubled silence descends - the old times are shifting again; they are rearranging like fault lines. The past will not relent.

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