Rosemary Mahoney Quotations

The first thing the Chinese ask you when they meet you is: 'How much money do you make?' It's a legitimate question to ask in China.

In 'A Likely Story,' I wanted to recreate the events, the mood, and the imagery of my life as a teenager. I was thirty-seven when I wrote it.

A lot of Polish and Russian Jews had this experience: they would emigrate, thinking they were on their way to New York. Then their captains would stop in Dublin and say, 'Everybody off.' They would leave, and by the time they discovered they weren't in America, they didn't have enough money to continue.

We always think, 'Well, for a person who's blind, it must be an amazing, joyful miracle if by some chance their sight is restored to them.' Now, this may be true for blind people who lost their vision at a later age. It's rarely true for people who were born blind or who go blind at a very young age.

I think the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to reconstruct real life with all its color, hardship, joy, and intrigue. If you're interested in people, you honor them best, I think, by making the fullest possible picture of them. Your subjects may - and from my experience probably will - protest your portrait of them.

When you hear that China is overcrowded, that's an understatement. I was shocked at the number of people. Even in the rural areas. I was also shocked at the poverty and at the living conditions.

I am not afraid to die. I simply do not want to.

When I was a senior in high school, I went to Ireland to study Irish Gaelic. And after one semester at Trinity College, I went way out to the west coast of Ireland and rented a little house by myself.

Americans generally associate boats with leisure. Vastly less prosperous, Egyptians associate them with nothing but labour. Rowing a boat is something a fisherman is forced to do to make a living; how could such an activity bring me - a woman no less - pleasure?

I wanted Lillian Hellman to be perfect because I wasn't perfect myself. I really wanted a mentor.