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“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.” — Edna O’Brien

“I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.” — Iris Murdoch

“When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin.” — J. P. Donleavy 

“If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilized.” — Oscar Wilde 

“Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there’s the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.” — John McGahern

“There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.” — John Millington Synge 

“I was born on a storm-swept rock and hate the soft growth of sun-baked lands where there is no frost in men’s bones.” — Liam O’Flaherty

“I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.” — George Bernard Shaw 

“Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.” — Conor Cruise O’Brien