Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.

- Sean O Faolain

The framework of the artist's ideas is clearly only that which he is forever seeking for universality, and must be far wider than the framework of th…

- Sean O Faolain

Love lives in sealed bottles of regret.

- Sean O Faolain

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that it makes things happen.

- Sean O Faolain

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

- Sean O Faolain

I have always felt that everybody on earth goes about in disguise.

- Sean O Faolain

In the presence of great music we have no alternative but to live nobly.

- Sean O Faolain

Stories, like whiskey, must be allowed to mature in the cask.

- Sean O Faolain

Pessimists are usually kind. The gay, bubbling over, have no time for the pitiful.

- Sean O Faolain