Sean O Faolain quotes:

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have no time for the pitiful.

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.

Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.

If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wandering in delighted bewilderment through a darkness shot with lightning and purple flame.

In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly.

Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of the ideals of the patriot.

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.