“I admire certain priests and nuns who go off on their own and do God's work on their own, who help in the ghettos, but as far as the institution of the church is concerned, I think it is despicable.”
“He came to the States in 1963, I think with a view to making up with my mother, but that didn't work. He came for three weeks, and drank his way all over Brooklyn. And went back... I went to his funeral in Belfast.”
“They all went into the bar business. Which was a mistake, because they began to sip at the merchandise and it set them back, set us all back. Well, them more than I.”
“I'm more inclined to go back now because Limerick has changed so much. One of the reasons it was such a grim... or the grimmest of all towns, was that it was the only large city or town in Ireland that didn't have a university. So they put in a university about 20 years ago, and it has changed the whole atmosphere of the place.”
“You know how it is in Hollywood, everybody kisses everybody. It's a handshake in Ireland. And a kind of tentativeness. Except when it's mothers and small children.”
“I'd just go into a room in my memory and just look around and start seeing things that I'd forgotten, like the alphabet on the blackboard in Irish, which we had to chant every day for months and months and months. I remember the Gaelic script and things like that. And this awful, putrid lavatory that we used outside.”
“Samuel Beckett was saying, in a new biography, that he could remember being in the womb, which, of course, is a bit farfetched. But he's an Irishman, so nothing's too farfetched.”
