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" The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard. "

Patrick Kavanagh

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" There is nothing as dead and as damned as an important thing. The things that really matter are casual, insignificant little things. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Publicity's a cancer. It eats out a man - till there's nothing but a shell left. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Ay - 'The Green Fool' business, the libel action over the head of it - did me a lot of damage. It destroyed the momentum. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" A poet is never one of the people. He is detached, remote, and the life of small-time dances and talk about football would not be for him. He might take part but could not belong. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin's life, the literary and artistic. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" In the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was in my prime as a film critic, the industry was booming. Hollywood, to give them their due, always called it the industry, through quite a few imagined it as an art form and went through several hours regularly at tiresome films in the sacred cause of art. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Letting the facts speak for themselves is an immoral principle when we all know that facts and figures can be selected to prove anything. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" In the country places of Ireland, writing is held in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" The second-grade films - where are they? No more are they made, and yet they were by far the best films for holding hands at, and wasn't this always the main purpose of the cinema? "

Patrick Kavanagh

" It might be said that the pose of absolute honesty is the most dishonest one of all. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Undoubtedly, there are a number of well-developed, mainly female, stars helping Miss Taylor to hold the film industry together: Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, etc. But such an insistence on cheesecake smells of bankruptcy. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Malice is only another name for mediocrity. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" Wine and women do not go with song. Alcohol is the worst enemy of the imagination. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" The keynote of simple folk is bad manners, familiarity. They intrude on one's private soul. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" What appears in newspapers is often new but seldom true. "

Patrick Kavanagh

" The exciting quality about Joyce is that when you read him, you are not told of the large public issues that were agitating the minds of politicians and journalists on those days. Joyce is interested in the mind of a man who has put five shillings on a horse. "

Patrick Kavanagh