Edna O'Brien Quotes

Irish writer (1930–2024)

Josephine Edna O'Brien (15 December 1930 – 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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Alternative Names: Josephine Edna O'Brien

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I don't think I have ever learned the game of men and women. To this day I regret the fact that it's like a dance I couldn't learn.

Oh, God, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you'd have made them different. And Jesus, who snubbed your mother, you hate them more.

[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.

Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.

The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

It 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.