A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.

Acting doesn't have to be threadbare misery all the time.

I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.

To be honest I live among the English and have always found them to be very honest in their business dealings. They are noble, hard-working and anxious to do the right thing. But joy eludes them, they lack the joy that the Irish have.

A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.

Theater is dangerously open to repetition. It's exciting when you hit on a new way.

My mother taught me to read.

The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.

People who are good at film have a relationship with the camera.

Theater dates very quickly.

I think America becomes more disgruntled by going to the movies and having an endlessly good time at them.

There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.

I certainly had no intention of playing a man.

I can hardly decide what plays I should be in.

Once you've done one style, you leave it for a while.

I would love to write the story of my upbringing in Ireland.

I just think that things should be allowed to run their course, and not turned into a Disney ride.

Every generation is obsessed with the decade before they were born.

So I just play the character, I play the lines.

I take the theater seriously in that I loathe it, I'm bored by it.

The energy released by it is enormous and it becomes quite addictive, the power between the audience and the actor.

I had a ball doing Harry Potter.

Also, an area that interests me - and it will probably take years to state what I mean - is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.

The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.

This whole tribal loyalty seems to have gone.

One moment cannot be the most important.

Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a joy.

I find it incredibly tedious, hate that it murders itself with its own conservative pomposity.

There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.

There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.

There's something about the Irish that is remarkable.

My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.

It has to do with the fact that Ford, for all his greatness, is an Irish egomaniac, as anyone who knows him will say.

The best thanks we could offer those who went before and raised the Irish working class from their knees was to press forward with determination and enthusiasm towards the ultimate goal of their efforts, a Co-operative Commonwealth for Ireland.

I'm Irish. I think about death all the time.

Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth.

We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.

Our fifty principal cities contain 39.3 per cent of our entire German population, and 45.8 per cent of the Irish. Our ten larger cities only nine per cent of the entire population, but 23 per cent of the foreign.

Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.

I think the Irish woman was freed from slavery by bingo. They can go out now, dressed up, with their handbags and have a drink and play bingo. And they deserve it.

There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.

The basic policy of the British Government was that since the majority of people in Northern Ireland wished to remain in the United Kingdom, that was that. We asked what would happen if the majority wanted something else, if the majority wanted to see Irish unity.

Well I think that's probably one of a few, where I grew up in the City of New York, it's got a lot of energy, my parents are Irish-American so there was a bit of yelling going on in my house but it seemed normal.

The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.

You think the Welsh are friendly, but the Irish are fabulous.

In 1953 there were two ways for an Irish Catholic boy to impress his parents: become a priest or attend Notre Dame.

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotts as a joke, but the Scotts haven't seen the joke yet.

For a man to come right out and say he does not believe in the Old Testament, I think many Catholics across the nation as well as the world are offended by Bill O'Reilly claiming he's an Irish Catholic.