Make-believe has so long held sway that truth arrives on the scene with all the aspect of an ogre. As a consequence, the real history of their country is a sealed book to the vast majority of the Irish. They neither ask for it nor is it given them.
I guess I'm going to fade into Bolivian.
When I first started playing music in 1955, there was just a small body of people that knew it. It was a very esoteric type of thing.
Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
She even learnt the language of a strange country which Senior Cosetti had been told some people believed still existed, although no-one in the world could say where it was. The name of this country was Wales.
Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings.
Wyatt Walker can walk through Harlem. No one would know him.
Translation from one language to another is like viewing a piece of tapestry on the wrong side where though the figures are distinguishable yet there are so many ends and threads that the beauty and exactness of the work is obscured.
During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.
If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer.
