FRANK DELANEY

Storytelling, in print or speech, needs vital energy.

First a piece of Irish wisdom: you should always listen to a bookie. For they have a saying, 'Money tells a good story,' and somewhere in their odds is a kind of science-fiction existentialism that decrees that we, the people, know everything. In other words, betting patterns often make for good, unconscious soothsaying.

If you have a book, you have a friend.

Kitchens are for conversation. They're not just for cooking; they're for conversations.

We all belong to an ancient identity. Stories are the rivers that take us there.

If you need proof of how the oral relates to the written, consider that many great novelists, including Joyce and Hemingway, never submitted a piece of work without reading it aloud.

'The Great Gatsby,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald, remains the most perfect novel that has ever come out of the United States. Everything in the book moves as it should, in the manner of a piece by Bach or Mozart.

I write - and then I write some more.

Writers have opinions - that, in part, is why they write. Therefore they have strong likes and dislikes.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

To understand and reconnect with our stories, the stories of the ancestors, is to build our identities.

I'd have to struggle to find a subject in which I can't get some kind of interested pulse started.

For a startling period of my life, I reported the Troubles in Ireland for the BBC. I lived in Dublin and was called out to all sorts of incidents that, if taken together, add up to a war - bombings, assassinations, riots, shootings, robberies, jailbreaks, kidnappings, and sieges.

As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.

We Irish prefer embroideries to plain cloth. To us Irish, memory is a canvas--stretched, primed, and ready for painting on. We love the "story" part of the word "history," and we love it trimmed out with color and drama, ribbons and bows. Listen to our tunes, observe a Celtic scroll: we always decorate our essence.

Find your soul and you'll live. Lose your soul and you'll die.

I never met a librarian worth his or her salt who didn't perceive my passion for books.

Every pain is a lesson.

Do you know what the difference is between Friendship and Love? Friendship is the photograph, Love is the oil painting.

Should; shouldn't; ought; oughtn't—the enemies of contentment.

When I come out on the road of a morning, when I have had a night's sleep and perhaps a breakfast, and the sun lights a hill on the distance, a hill I know I shall walk across an hour or two thence, and it is green and silken to my eye, and the clouds have begun their slow, fat rolling journey across the sky, no land in the world can inspire such love in a common man.

Start with the difficult and when it gets easy, everything else is easier.

Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, that's how the human race goes forward. And if it's too late for children, there's the companionship of a safe and trusted person.

The difference between a friend and an enemy is friendliness.

I believe the world of the spirit is in general greatly neglected and not at all served by the practice of faith as we know it, because religion isn't individual enough.