Edna O'Brien

"Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise youd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more."

"The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed."

"I dont think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that its like a dance I couldnt learn."

"Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul. (Vogue, April 1985)"

"Theres nothing like obstacle to make a writer"

"When were young, we leave home and we think were leaving behind us our roots. And we do leave them behind for a time. And then they catch up with us, and they twine themselves around us and thats a great thing."

"What literature does, if its any good, is to open the soul, the mind, the psyche and the body of a reader. Im always looking for that - and in some cases getting into trouble for even attempting it."

"A lot of young writers send me books and they want to be published, to be famous, to be known. That isnt the job. That comes later, if it comes at all. A writer has to love that vocation - and it is an extremely unbefriended and difficult vocation."

"one of the things about writing is that each book is a beginning. Each book is another hurdle up the ladder or up the mountain of ones country and ones own sensibility."

"She has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse."

"What has happened (its funny, but its also very serious) is that language is used now to cover up language is used as a deception, in every country, in every area, whereas great language and the imperative of great language is truth."

"A work of art has a big space. If for a moment we think of something else - and I wont dodge the question of Picassos Guernica, or Pieter Bruegels Hunters - theyre huge canvasses in which everything is allowed. Everything is painted in, everything is depicted, so that the viewer enters the whole world of that story or that tragedy, or that war or that hunt. It is quite different — and must be — to reportage."