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“The black dog was the only intelligent member of the family. He died a few years later. He was poisoned, and no one will convince me it wasn’t suicide.”
”We do not squabble, fight or have rows. We collect grudges. We’re in an arms race, storing up warheads for the domestic Armageddon.”
”I asked him if he had the results of the x-rays. He took me into his surgery … He gave me one of those looks of his, redolent of the cemetery, and said that I should buy day-returns from now on instead of season tickets.”
”As somebody once said, we’re not punished for our sins, we’re punished by them.”
”I’m a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn’t able to do anything else.”
”We are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We’re also all the kindnesses we did. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don’t understand time.”
”Being an Irish writer both hampers and helps me. Hampers, because one is fighting the preconceptions of audiences who have been conditioned to expect feyness and parochial subject matter; helps, because the writer can utilise a vigorous and poetic idiom which enables him to combine subtlety with richness.”
Hugh Leonard 1926-2009