Edna O'Brien

Writers are always anxious always on the run from the telephone from responsibilities from the distractions of the world.

In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'

What matters is the imaginative truth.

I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.

Writing is like carrying a fetus.

Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.

My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.

Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.

Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.

Promiscuity is the death of love.

In a way Winter is the real Spring - the time when the inner things happen, the resurgence of nature.