My Favorite Optimist Was An American Who

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.

Yes, But Also One Of The Problems For A Novelist In Ireland Is The Fact That There Are No Formal Manners. I Mean Some People Have Beautiful Manners But There's No Kind Of Agreed Form Of Manners.

I Suppose . . . In Writing You Can't Have Regrets. I Mean, You Just Get It Down The Way It Was . . . It's Only Wishful Thinking That Things Could Be Other Than They Were.

Anything That Is Given Can Be At Once Taken Away. We Have To Learn Never To Expect Anything, And When It Comes It's No More Than A Gift On Loan.

Among Its Many Other Obligations, Fiction Always Has To Be Believable. Life Does Not Have To Suffer Such Constraint, And Much Of What Takes Place Is Believable Only Because It Happens.