Quotes by Edna O'Brien

• The vote means nothing to women. We should be armed.
• Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
• Recollection is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it.
• My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.
• In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: 'Is there someone new?'
• I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.
• I have some women friends but I prefer men. Don't trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.
• I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.
• Countries are either mothers or fathers, and engender the emotional bristle secretly reserved for either sire.
• Writing is like carrying a fetus.