Joseph O'Neill Quotes
We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one's life?
Who has the courage to set right those misperceptions that bring us love?
I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.
It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.
New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.
people in new york are authorized by convention to snoop around and mentally measure and pass comment on any real estate they're invited to step into.
Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.
...even my work, the largest of the pots and pans I'd placed under my life's leaking ceiling, had become to small to contain my misery.