Best 35 quotes of Niall Williams on MyQuotes

All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are

A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is raw as a wound. It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once and ultimately achieves the kind of spirit-healing few novels do

Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know.

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.

It was as if we were at the heart of a maze. We were overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks ahead. Mary had given us a bottle of milk and a spoonful of loose tea, and so, unable to decide what to do, we did what all Irish men and women do: we had tea. Suddenly the sun appeared and not for the first or last time we felt it uplifting us and changing everything. It seemed like a holiday.

Somehow the river is louder when you cover your ears.

Some people make you feel better about living. Some people you meet and you feel this little lift in your heart, this 'Ah', because there's something in them that's brighter or lighter, something beautiful or better than you, and here's the magic: instead of feeling worse, instead of feeling 'why am I so ordinary?', you feel just the opposite, you feel glad. In a weird way you feel better, because before this you hadn't realised or you'd forgotten human beings could shine so.

There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God. God is the greatest puzzle of all.

The water is this marvellous blue. It’s so blue that once you see it you realise you’ve never seen blue before. That other thing you were calling blue is some other colour, it’s not blue. This, this is blue. It’s a blue that comes down from the sky into the water so that when you look in the sea you think sky and when you look at the sky you think sea.

The world is more outlandish than some people’s imaginations.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds

When you’re different you’ve got two choices. You can stand out or you step back.

Allora, come va il tuo libro, Ruth?' mi ha chiesto Timmy. 'Ruth vuol fare la scrittrice' ha spiegato a Packy. In realtà io non volevo fare la scrittrice, volevo fare la lettrice, aspirazione assai più rara. Ma sai com'è, una cosa tira l'altra.

And in just this way the days after my father's death became weeks became months in the familiar ceaseless cruelty of time, carrying us ever forward even when we sit still. Time does not pass, pain grows." (p.223)

Beside the river there are two things you never forget, that the moment you look at a river that moment has already passed, and that everything is on its way somewhere else.

Forse ogni poeta è condannato all'insoddisfazione. Dev'essere per colpa della luce che li abbaglia

Ho letto tutti gli autori usuali, Austen, Brontë, Eliot, Hardy, ma Dickens è come un paese meraviglioso dove le persone sono più brillanti e vivaci, più comiche e più tragiche e in loro compagnia senti che il mondo è più ricco e fantastico di quanto immaginavi

Human beings are not seamless smooth creations, they have insoluble parts, and the closer you look the more mysterious they become.

If I am alive this is my book, and my father lives now in the afterlife that is a book, a thing not vague or virtual but something you can hold and feel and smell because to my mind heaven like life must be a thing sensual and real. And my book will be a river and have the Salmon literal and metaphoric leaping inside it and be called History of the Rain, so that his book does not perish, and you will know my book exists because of him and because of his books and his aspiration to leap up, to rise. You will know that I found him in his books, in the covers his hands held, the pages they turned, in the paper and the print, but also in the worlds those books contained, where now I have been and you have been too. You will know the story goes from the past to the present and into the future, and like a river flows.

I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the handling. A book is a sensual thing. You sit in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it's, well, enveloping. Weird I am, I know(...)You either get it or you don't.

In love everything changes, and continues changing all the time. There is no stillness, no stopped clock of the heart in which the moment of happiness holds forever, but only the constant whirring forward motion of desire and need, rising and falling, falling and rising, full of doubts then certainties that moment by moment change and become doubts again.

It is what writers do, imagine and feel the pain of others, sometimes at the expense of feeling their own. Here, then, in these pages is mine, the fear of death, of loss, of unexpressed love. Here is the truth told in a story. And in the telling of it perhaps I have found some way to have courage, to believe.

It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.

It's hard to live on hope. Living on hope you get thin and tired. Hope pares you away from the inside. You're all the time living in the future. In the future things will be better, you hope, and you'll feel better and you won't wake up feeling like someone has been taking the life of you drip by drip while you slept.

Love ... was part imagination, its web spun as much in the dark lonely separated evenings of longing as in the shared times together.

Men are private. This I have learned. They are whole continents of privacy; you can only go to the borders; you can look in but you cannot enter.

Non ricordo in che libro fosse. Ma ora è in questo

Partire e fermarsi sono le due cose più difficili

Se sei diverso hai due possibilità: o ti distingui o cerchi di passare inosservato

The nobleman fell to his knees. 'Sir, come down to my son ere he die.' His old face. His love for his son. None of us spoke, the old man kneeling so. I watched your eyes. The pity that pooled, this love of the father. 'Go thy way; thy son lives,' you said. And he raised his face to you, and we could see that he believed.

The parts of our lives when we write them down seem to belong in different books, by different writers even. What all these bits and pieces make up I don't know. There is no plot. Perhaps meaning is something we invent afterward, putting it all together, like imagined God.

Umoristica (sessista): "Alcuni membri della Commissione avrebbero preferito che le donne non fossero ammesse in Irlanda, ma ci voleva pure qualcuno che stirasse

Writing is a sickness only cured by writing.

You can't be beautiful and a writer, because to be a writer you have to be the one doing the looking; if you're beautiful people will be looking at you.