Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.
I've always been conscious of the fact that there aren't enough Irish voices on British television compared to the amount of Irish people who live there.
I think Irish women are strong as horses, incredibly loyal and for the most part, funny, witty, bright and optimistic in the face of devastating reality.
I have the soul of a singer and do splendidly in the shower but the world will never hear it. Basically, I'm the only Irish person who can't carry a tune.
So many Irish actors overplay that modesty because they're afraid people will judge them and say, 'The state of yer man, he thinks he's great,' or whatever.
People often ask me why I sing with a strong Irish accent. I suppose when I was five years old, I spoke with a strong Irish accent, so I sang with one, too.
Hats are the epitome of Englishness, and a royal wedding is the penultimate moment for a hat designer. I'm Irish, but I am a royalist and I believe in fantasy.
I couldn't fit in the Irish community in New York. I was never one of the boys because they would talk about baseball or basketball, and I knew nothing about it.
I think the Irish woman was freed from slavery by bingo. They can go out now, dressed up, with their handbags and have a drink and play bingo. And they deserve it.
The first play I wrote was called 'Twenty-five.' It was played by our company in Dublin and London, and was adapted and translated into Irish and played in America.
Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.
I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.
I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I'm your classic American mutt.
I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.
No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic.
I'm lucky because I have so many clashing cultural, racial things going on: black, Jewish, Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee. I can float and be part of any community I want.
There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of one at the moment.
You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us.
Many cultures believe that on a certain day - Halloween, the Irish Samhain Eve, Mexico's 'Dia de los Muertos' - the veil between this world and the next is especially thin.
Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.
I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish.
As an Irish person, there's a historical fascination with America: America is the default green and promised land for Irish people and Italians; that's what we grow up with.
Irish people give big hellos and very little goodbyes. Unless they're female, and then they spend five hours talking in the doorway to the person that's leaving their house.
I was Irish; I was a woman. Yet night after night, bent over the table, I wrote in forms explored and sealed by English men hundreds of years before. I saw no contradiction.
I was a huge fan of J. Courtney Sullivan's novel 'Maine,' and like that novel, 'Saint' is a family saga set in Boston. Irish Catholic family secrets - is there anything better?
I like that kind of weather. Constant drizzle. At the Olympic trials in 2012, my mom was, like, 'It's pouring rain out there, Mary. You shouldn't even notice it. You're Irish.'
My old manager of the Irish National Theatre said 'Don't worry about being a star, just worry about being a working actor. Just keep working.' I think that's really good advice.
If you ask me where do I belong, it would be somewhere in the Irish Sea almost - born in Hong Kong, Chinese mother, Portuguese father from Macao, lived in Europe most of my life.
I've got many different voices - I have a Southern girl, an Irish girl. I have a gibberish language that you'd have to decipher. I guess I try to never take myself too seriously.
Growing up in an old-fashioned Bengali Hindu family and going to a convent school run by stern Irish nuns, I was brought up to revere rules. Without rules, there was only anarchy.
I hope 'The Voice' has a fifteen-year run, don't get me wrong. But I come from nothing, and maybe it's the Irish in me, but my attitude is always like, 'They'll figure me out soon.'
I will never forget walking out on a Saturday night with Simon Cowell and Sharon Osbourne, household names who were opinionated and full of confidence, and I was just this Irish guy.
The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.
Anyone who starts badmouthing Latino immigrants is not only a racist but ignorant. You need to refer them to what was written about the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, any group you want.
Our communities have been deeply enhanced by immigration, be it of Irish Catholics across the constituency or of Muslims from Gujarat in India or from Pakistan, principally from Kashmir.
It was in a stonecutter's house where I went to have a headstone made for Raftery's grave that I found a manuscript book of his poems, written out in the clear beautiful Irish characters.
The strange thing is I can't play jigs or reels or any of that traditional Irish stuff as well as I ought to, whereas I think I have got a good ear for blues, the tonality of it and so on.
The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.
But more than anything else, for the British folks Irish people were all terrorists. So when we went to Britain, it was always a lot of resistance to U2. And that's why we came to America.
Inherently in us as Irish people, wherever you are in the world, when you hear an Irish accent, it's like a moth to a flame. There's a real personable pride and camaraderie about being Irish.
It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?
We have, therefore, directed the Irish Army authorities to have field hospitals established in County Donegal adjacent to Derry and at other points along the Border where they may be necessary.
Who can doubt that between the English and the French, between the Scotch and the Irish, there are differences of character which have profoundly affected and still affect the course of history?
My mother came from an Irish family of 11 kids and, of course, had a sister who was a nun, so I spent time at a convent and with an aunt and uncle who lived in New York and took me to the theater.
How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it 'taoiseach.' We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.
I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.
I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.
The Irish move to a very low corporation tax has generated very significant revenue growth, considerably in excess of Britain's, where a slower economy has been combined with a number of stealth taxes.
Oh, the Irish were building the railroads down through Mexico, through Chihuahua. They finished the railroads when they finished out in the West Coast, and they went down and put the trains into Mexico.
I grew up in Manchester in a big Irish family - there are seven of us in all - so my life has always been about role-playing, about doing anything for a laugh. I'm always joking about; that's the way I am.