If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have no time for the pitiful.

Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.