Top 40 Roddy Doyle Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “No matter how close to personal experience a story might be, inevitably you are going to get to a part that isn’t yours and, actually, whether it happened or not becomes irrelevant. It is all about choosing the right words.”

— Roddy Doyle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

2. “When you grow up on an island, what matters is how you stand to the sea.”

— Roddy Doyle

3. “Dreaming was only nice while it lasted.”

— Roddy Doyle

4. “Sometimes adults seem as though they have cut a chord from being a child.”

— Roddy Doyle

5. “If there is a heaven, Jane Austen is sitting in a small room with Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, listening to Duran Duran, forever. If there’s a hell, she’s standing.”

— Roddy Doyle

6. “Do be kind to yourself. Fill pages as quickly as possible; double space, or write on every second line. Regard every new page as a small triumph, until you get to page 50. Then calm down, and start worrying about the quality. Do feel anxiety – it’s the job.”

— Roddy Doyle

7. “It was a sign of growing up, when the dark made no more difference to you than the day.”

— Roddy Doyle

8. “I wasn’t even aware of the Year of the Family. I couldn’t give a toss. These things – the year of the family, the year of the three-legged dog. I think it’s all trash.”

— Roddy Doyle

9. “It’s a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it is a dreary little dump most of the time.”

— Roddy Doyle

10. “To claim that music is more important than oxygen would be trite and sentimental. It would also be true.”

— Roddy Doyle

11. “If you’re from Dublin, for example, chances are you live with your family, if you’re lucky enough to, right up to the mid-20s. And most of the people I know, when they finally sort of set off on their own, they don’t stray all that far.”

— Roddy Doyle

12. “She was in the book again and, by the time she got to page-turning time again, she’d forgetting I was there.”

— Roddy Doyle

13. “She’s a pot-of-tea-before-I-say-boo-to-you woman. There’s always a pile of warm teabags in the sink when I come down, like what a horse would leave behind.”

— Roddy Doyle

14. “I do enjoy Gothic fiction or books about zombies if they are well written and I like vampires.”

— Roddy Doyle

15. “I’m going to sound like an old man but at my age, it’s lovely doing something that you’ve never done before.”

— Roddy Doyle

16. “I see people in terms of dialogue and I believe that people are their talk.”

— Roddy Doyle

17. “Most working days I can be at my desk for nine hours a day.”

— Roddy Doyle

18. “The best way to reveal a character is to get them to open their mouths.”

— Roddy Doyle

19. “I’ve been asked why does Ireland produce so many great musicians, and the answer is it doesn’t. When you count the great musicians Ireland has given the world in the last 20 years, you can do it on one hand.”

— Roddy Doyle

20. “I don’t work to any commissions. I do what I want to do.”

— Roddy Doyle

21. “Head in the book. Nose sliding down the valley between the pages.”

— Roddy Doyle

22. “I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn’t a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.”

— Roddy Doyle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

23. “Some of the people who look the most normal are probably the maddest people trying to look normal.”

— Roddy Doyle

24. “When I was growing up, the exam system didn’t allow you to write fiction, so you never did.”

— Roddy Doyle

25. “I tend to plan as I write. And I want to leave myself open and the character open to keep on going until it seems to be the time to stop.”

— Roddy Doyle

26. “I’m not recognised that much. I’m just a bald man in glasses and there’s a rash of them in Dublin. It’d be different if I had a mohican.”

— Roddy Doyle

27. “Contact J. Rabbitte, 118, Chestnut Ave., Dublin 21. Rednecks and southsiders need not apply.”

— Roddy Doyle

28. “When I’m writing I just think there’s only the page and me and nobody else.”

— Roddy Doyle

29. “I wouldn’t go out of my way to experience the indignity of middle-age just because it might be good meat for a story.”

— Roddy Doyle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

30. “Good ideas are often murdered by better ones.”

— Roddy Doyle

31. “My parents were sixty years married.”

— Roddy Doyle

32. “I knew all the books in the house. I knew their shapes and smells. I knew what pages would open if I held them with the spine on the ground and let the sides drop. I knew all the books but I couldn’t remember the name of the one on my head.”

— Roddy Doyle

33. “Schools don’t really allow failure and yet it’s part of any endeavour, not just writing.”

— Roddy Doyle

34. “It’s great meeting children because you never know what they will say.”

— Roddy Doyle

35. “She’d tried her hand at most things, but drew the line at honesty.”

— Roddy Doyle

36. “Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.”

— Roddy Doyle

37. “I like naming characters.”

— Roddy Doyle

38. “They were joking, but it was a serious conversation. They were often like that, Mary and her granny, when they were alone together.”

— Roddy Doyle

39. “If you are a writer you’re at home, which means you’re out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.”

— Roddy Doyle

40. “My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.”

— Roddy Doyle

41. “It’s hard for me to measure them, or to assess my books because I’m so close to them.”

— Roddy Doyle

42. “You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.”

— Roddy Doyle