Patrick Kavanagh Quotations

I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin's life, the literary and artistic.

The keynote of simple folk is bad manners, familiarity. They intrude on one's private soul.

The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse.

Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination.

A man is original when he speaks the truth that has always been known to all good men.

In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled.

Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static.

What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true.

Ay - 'The Green Fool' business, the libel action over the head of it - did me a lot of damage. It destroyed the momentum.

How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life.

Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything.

Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.

Publicity's a cancer. It eats out a man - till there's nothing but a shell left.

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

There is nothing as dead and as damned as an important thing. The things that really matter are casual, insignificant little things.

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.

Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.

In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.

Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.

To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime's experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience.

A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong.

It is impossible to read the daily press without being diverted from reality. You are full of enthusiasm for the eternal verities - life is worth living, and then out of sinful curiosity you open a newspaper. You are disillusioned and wrecked.

Publication there [in Nimbus] was to prove a turning point… The publication of his next volume of verse, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, was to be directly linked to the mini-collection in Nimbus, and his Collected Poems (1964)

Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.

It often occurs to me that we love most what makes us miserable. In my opinion the damned are damned because they enjoy being damned.

Malice is only another name for mediocrity.

Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published.

I dabbled in verse and it became my life

God cannot catch us. Unless we stay in the unconscious room. Of our hearts.

There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.

My chin is weak. I find it hard to make decisions. For years I had been caught between the two stools of security on the land and rich-scented life on the exotic islands of literature. I wasn't really a writer. I had seen a strange beautiful light on the hills and that was all.

A sweeping statement is the only statement worth listening to. The critic without faith gives balanced opinions, usually about second-rate writers.

We are not alone in our loneliness, others have been here and known griefs we thought our special own...

The bicycles go by in twos and threes - There's a dance in Billy Brennan's barn to-night, And there's the half-talk code of mysteries And the wink-and-elbow language of delight. Half-past eight and there is not a spot Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown That might turn out a man or woman, not A footfall tapping secrecies of stone. I have what every poet hates in spite Of all the solemn talk of contemplation. Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight Of being king and government and nation. A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

On the stem of memory imaginations blossom.