Best 25 quotes of J. P. Donleavy on MyQuotes

And no. I must not go on thinking. For the pain will never go away. You just go on and live. In the dust of desertion. Still falling where last I loved.

At the age of 18 I don't think that I thought very differently than I did at the age of 25. I think we instinctively have the knowledge and adapt the knowledge we need.

Blessed are they who in this sea of frailty, climb aboard a piece of ass as it floats by.

Dear Mr Skully, I have caught my neck in a mangle and will be indisposed for eternity. Yours in death S.D.

Electronic books are a bad thing because they cannot be accumulated on shelves to remind you of your past, to impress your neighbors and colleagues, and to help prevent divorces thanks to the sheer bother of arguing over who owns what.

Food Throwers: Begun usually by estranged couples, once this victual flinging starts, everyone will do it...Should your dinner party have become an out of control concussion match with opponents catapulting croutons and petits pois across the mahogany, don't fight it, go with it. And when you have the desire to quell the uprising approach the original perpetrator from behind. There, slowly crown her with the contents of the fresh fruit salad bowl. But be warned. Although this immobilizes and rivits everyone's attention it also gives them new ideas.

I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.

I'm starved for love. Not ordinary love but real love. The love that's like music or something.

I remember one letter from a girl in a midwestern town who read one of my books and thought she had discovered it- that no one had ever read it or knew about it. Then one day in her local library she found cards for one or two of my other books. They were full of names- the books were borrowed all the time. She resented this a bit and then walked around the town looking in everybody's face and wondering if they were the ones who were reading my books. That is someone I write for.

On Being Old. It's not nice but take comfort that you won't stay that way for ever.

Revenge is what I want. Nothing but pure unadulterated revenge. But my mother brought me up to be a lady.

See all the women seated, youth in their face lifts, old age in their hands.

Sometimes you write and you find yourself almost wondering how it will turn out. I don't think every writer sort of almost admits that at some stage his books can take on their own kind of life it selves and simply lead away into directions that they're not kind of prepared for.

The best book of the year, Grobel's writing is quite marvelous. The Hustons reads vividly, just like one of John Huston's great films.

The inhabitants will always see both sides of an argument so long as it can result in a fight.

The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.

To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.

When I die, I want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in Dublin. I wonder would they know it was me?

When you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both, it's health. If everything is simply jake, then you're frightened of death

You know, there must be happiness somewhere, when a lawyer dies.

Ginny Cupper took me in her car out to the spread fields of Indiana. Parking near the edge of woods and walking out into the sunny rows of corn, waving seeds to a yellow horizon. She wore a white blouse and a gray patch of sweat under her arms and the shadow of her nipples was gray. We were rich. So rich we could never die. Ginny laughed and laughed, white saliva on her teeth lighting up the deep red of her mouth, fed the finest food in the world. Ginny was afraid of nothing. She was young and old. Her brown arms and legs swinging in wild optimism, beautiful in all their parts. She danced on the long hood of her crimson Cadillac, and watching her, I thought that God must be female. She leaped into my arms and knocked me to the ground and screamed into my mouth.

O summer and soft wind. Relieves the heart and makes living cheaper.

She thought too that women didn't know what to do with themselves these days which could turn them into harridans. Hardly a female friend she knew wasn't miserable. Either mind dumb with children, or in the married condition married to an earnest toiler, or lonely unmarried in their successful career.

... With a slight miscalculated leap cleared to the iron picket fence. Put the fear of God into me, picket fences and balls don't mix.

Writing is turning life's worst moments into money.