Top 40 Fiona Shaw Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I’m not on the run from anything and I’m not at all clear about what I’m running towards. But as some great writer put it, I want to be certain that when I arrive at death, I’m totally exhausted.”

— Fiona Shaw

2. “The word democracy has no meaning. Duty has gone. Only rights remain.”

— Fiona Shaw

3. “A relationship is sent by God and accident.”

— Fiona Shaw

4. “I once saw my mother playing Mary Magdalene in a parish event. But she had to put the role aside in order to go and front the choir who were singing at the same occasion. She left the stage halfway through the Crucifixion.”

— Fiona Shaw

5. “My mother adores singing and plays piano. My uncle was a phenomenal pianist. My brother John is a double bassist. I used to play the piano, badly, and cello. My brother Peter played violin.”

— Fiona Shaw

6. “I’m not afraid of chaos and I’m happy talking to strangers. I really love not knowing where I’m going.”

— Fiona Shaw

7. “Every generation is obsessed with the decade before they were born.”

— Fiona Shaw

8. “Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a joy.”

— Fiona Shaw

9. “I loathe bad theater and most theatre is very bad because its repetitious, unexciting and, dangerously, it is sometimes praised for those things.”

— Fiona Shaw

10. “Irish people are educated not only about artistry but local history.”

— Fiona Shaw

11. “I had a ball doing Harry Potter.”

— Fiona Shaw

12. “I just think that things should be allowed to run their course, and not turned into a Disney ride.”

— Fiona Shaw

13. “And by endlessly sanitizing our feelings, we actually feed a disgruntled nation.”

— Fiona Shaw

14. “I can hardly decide what plays I should be in.”

— Fiona Shaw

15. “This whole tribal loyalty seems to have gone.”

— Fiona Shaw

16. “It was the most exciting sentence I’ve ever heard,” Lydia said. Reaching out, she stroked the back of Jean’s hand. “In front of your friends, to call me your love.”

— Fiona Shaw

17. “I would love to write the story of my upbringing in Ireland.”

— Fiona Shaw

18. “The energy released by it is enormous and it becomes quite addictive, the power between the audience and the actor.”

— Fiona Shaw

19. “The Americans are very clear, and obsessed with nouns.”

— Fiona Shaw

20. “Once you’ve done one style, you leave it for a while.”

— Fiona Shaw

21. “To be honest I live among the English and have always found them to be very honest in their business dealings. They are noble, hard-working and anxious to do the right thing. But joy eludes them, they lack the joy that the Irish have.”

— Fiona Shaw

22. “I think America becomes more disgruntled by going to the movies and having an endlessly good time at them.”

— Fiona Shaw

23. “Acting doesn’t have to be threadbare misery all the time.”

— Fiona Shaw

24. “There was no professional theater in Cork, but still I did a lot of performing.”

— Fiona Shaw

25. “Theater dates very quickly.”

— Fiona Shaw

26. “Sometimes he’d get annoyed at it, want to be left alone, wished he’d gone skateboarding, but mostly not.”

— Fiona Shaw

27. “Now I have begun to get interested in films and I just hope that people start becoming interested in me to do more films.”

— Fiona Shaw

28. “I take the theater seriously in that I loathe it, I’m bored by it.”

— Fiona Shaw

29. “Also, an area that interests me – and it will probably take years to state what I mean – is the period of the rise of democracy, with Tom Paine, which is around the turn of the 18th century into the 19th.”

— Fiona Shaw

30. “I would say the next imminent hot writers are often the writers from the decade before you were born.”

— Fiona Shaw

31. “There’s something about the Irish that is remarkable.”

— Fiona Shaw

32. “There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.”

— Fiona Shaw

33. “I enjoy making films, but my heart is in the stage. Every night you have to be on. There’s no second take.”

— Fiona Shaw

34. “People who are good at film have a relationship with the camera.”

— Fiona Shaw

35. “One moment cannot be the most important.”

— Fiona Shaw

36. “A lot of Irish people perform. They perform in drawing rooms. They sing songs and they play piano.”

— Fiona Shaw

37. “There is a great relief in experiencing the worst vicariously.”

— Fiona Shaw

38. “I find it incredibly tedious, hate that it murders itself with its own conservative pomposity.”

— Fiona Shaw

39. “I certainly had no intention of playing a man.”

— Fiona Shaw

40. “Theater is dangerously open to repetition. Its exciting when you hit on a new way.”

— Fiona Shaw

41. “The damp air eased between sheets tossed and loosened with dreams, kissing uncovered throats, slipping in with unguarded breaths to lie snugly in the lungs and wait for day.”

— Fiona Shaw

42. “Outside a new dark was falling, a dark Charlie didn’t know yet. He walked carefully, wheeling the bike. Like everything else here, the street lamps had bigger kingdoms and the pools of shadow between them fell wider and deeper than he was used. to.”

— Fiona Shaw

43. “Her head burned and her thoughts danced at the edge of her mind like scraps of ash in the heat of a fire.”

— Fiona Shaw