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

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

- Sean O Faolain

If we turn to early Irish literature, as we naturally may, to see what sort of people the Irish were in the infancy of the race, we find ourselves wa…

- 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

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

- Sean O Faolain

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

- Sean O Faolain