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Edna O'Brien Quotes (1930-2024)
Writer, King, Playwright
About Edna O'Brien
Josephine Edna O'Brien (15 December 1930 β 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer and playwright, who was resident in the United Kingdom from the late-1950s. Her first seven novels were banned in Ireland on publication, but she found an appreciative audience in her adopted country and in the United States.
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βThat is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.β
βWriting of any experience, male or female, is difficult. One has to keep one's eyes and ears open and then delve into the imagination.β
βNever forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature's assiduousness and human cruelty.β
βAll my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun's cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people.β
βIt is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.β
βWhat literature does, if it's any good, is to open the soul, the mind, the psyche and the body of a reader. I'm always looking for that - and in some cases getting into trouble for even attempting it.β
βI waked quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I awaken easily, and for a minute I could not remember what it was. Then I remembered, the old reason: he had not come home, my father.β
βWhen we're young, we leave home and we think we're leaving behind us our roots. And we do leave them behind for a time. And then they catch up with us, and they twine themselves around us and that's a great thing.β
β"We all leave one another. We die, we change - it's mostly change - we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it's inescapable."β
β(Do think of your work as political?) O'BRIEN: Well, everything is political: one's upbringing, the culture in which one grows up, even religion is political, whether we like it or not. Religion is supposed to be spiritual but we all know it isn't.β
βA lot of young writers send me books and they want to be published, 'to be famous, to be known'. That isn't the job. That comes later, if it comes at all. A writer has to love that vocation - and it is an extremely unbefriended and difficult vocation.β
β[On the banning of (her then) four novels in Ireland] I believe that mental disturbance by literature is a healthy and invigorating thing. We have plenty of comfortable and easy prose all around us, but it's by abrasion that people's prejudices are aroused.β
βI suppose the themes we choose - because there are many stories I could have chosen to write about, but I chose this one - are as much about us, the writer, as about the story. You have to live a story. You have to take it in and stay with it and hopefully bring it back outβ
βTo make a story both more alive and more suspenseful one has to think of altering the point of view of each chapter. In doing that one changes styles because each person thinks differently. I find it stimulating though a little daunting, but as reader and writer I am not interested in anything less.β
βIt is not that you have to be happy-that would be asking too much-but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it the generosity so necessary to create. (1984)β
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Edna O'Brien on Bureaucracy
βIt is increasingly clear that the fate of the universe will come to depend more and more on individuals as the bungling of bureaucracy permeates every corner of our existence.β
What Edna O'Brien Said About Others
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Quotes About Edna O'Brien
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Anatole Broyard on Edna O'Brien
βShe has always ridden the passions as if they were a magnificent horse.β
Miriam Dunne on Edna O'Brien
βCertainly I admire Edna O'Brien's work greatly. It would be difficult for any Irish woman writer to ignore the impact of her work during the repressive Ireland of the 1960s.β
Louise Erdrich on Edna O'Brien
Valerie Miner on Edna O'Brien
βEdna O'Brien transforms the lives of Irish women into a liturgy of premonition, doom, and enigmatic redemption...For all OβBrienβs sacramental melancholy, she exudes a worldly passion for the moment. She seduces readers with her direct, piercing gaze and pleases with the rhythms of her storytelling diction. Most of these tales are set in a territory between human brutality and inexplicable salvation. OβBrien takes it all inβthe small-mindedness, gossip, superstition, death of the spirit, and destruction of the body. Her characters dance on the edge of the grave, yet, perhaps because despair is for Catholics the only unpardonable sin, OβBrien often tosses them a mysterious line of absolution and hope.β
Ann Owens Weekes on Edna O'Brien
β...her perspective is women centered but not feminist: her works usually depict the traps of femininity rather than liberation.β
About Edna O'Brien
Josephine Edna O'Brien (15 December 1930 β 27 July 2024) was an Irish novelist, short-story writer and playwright, who was resident in the United Kingdom from the late-1950s. Her first seven novels were banned in Ireland on publication, but she found an appreciative audience in her adopted country and in the United States.