Explore Quotes by Brendan Behan

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

If you greatly desire something, have the guts to stake everything on obtaining it.

No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today.

A man is already halfway in love with any woman who listens to him.

I say myself no depressed words just depressed minds.

Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.

A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.

No man can discover his own talents.

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?

Every man, through fear, mugs his aspirations a dozen times a day.

At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self.

If you accept your limitations you go beyond them.

I am a daylight atheist.

The only thing I envy in young people is their livers.

Critics are like eunuchs; they can tell you what to do, but they can't do it themselves!

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

I wish I'd been a mixed infant.

What the hell difference does it make, left or right? There were good men lost on both sides.

New York is my Lourdes, where I go for spiritual refreshment... a place where you're least likely to be bitten by a wild goat.

The Bible was a consolation to a fellow alone in the old cell. The lovely thin paper with a bit of matress stuffing in it, if you could get a match, was as good a smoke as I ever tasted.