Joseph O'Neill Quotations

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate.

There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.

It takes a long, long time to write what I do write.

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn't have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.

I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.

When I read James Joyce, I'm not really interested in the Dublin of 1904. I'm interested in being in the presence of a voice and a sensibility underpinned by an authenticity which, I think, if you're a good writer, you can extract from the specific details of your own time. I think most writers do hope that their books will be read in ten years.

I think if you're writing about cricket, you're obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer.

It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again.

We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?