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Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Joseph O’Neill Quotes

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.

– Joseph O’Neill

I think you sense the metaphorical resonance of what you’re writing without analysing it too carefully. That leads you down dead ends. You stop imagining things and start writing towards these themes.

– Joseph O’Neill

There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, ‘I’m going to write a post-9/11 novel’ but I wasn’t one of those.

– Joseph O’Neill

I’m completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I’ll be a happy man.

– Joseph O’Neill

If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I’ll be a happy man.

– Joseph O’Neill

I love books where you feel you’re having a romance with the writer.

– Joseph O’Neill

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.

– Joseph O’Neill

It used to be the case that for an Irishman to come to the U.S. involved a perilous journey on a ship. It involved singing lots of songs before you left saying goodbye, and once you were in the U.S., it involved singing lots of songs about how you were never going to set foot in Ireland again.

– Joseph O’Neill

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.

– Joseph O’Neill

I went to an international school in Holland, and I didn’t have any memories of growing up in the United States or England or any of these places which other novelists are able to write about in relation to their childhoods.

– Joseph O’Neill

I think if you’re writing about cricket, you’re obviously writing about power, because cricket is such a loaded sport, much more so than soccer.

– Joseph O’Neill

Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That’s the way I do it, anyway.

– Joseph O’Neill

It takes a long, long time to write what I do write.

– Joseph O’Neill

I certainly want to continue to write in a way that’s intimate.

– Joseph O’Neill

You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.

– Joseph O’Neill