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Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.
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To journey for the sake of saving our own lives is little by little to cease to live in any sense that really matters, even to ourselves, because it is only by journeying for the world's sake - even when the world bores and sickens and scares you half to death - that little by little we start to come alive.
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Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion.
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Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.
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It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.
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Let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now rightfully fight against barbarians.
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The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.
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Freedom is like taking a bath: You got to keep doing it every day.
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My characters have to talk, or they're out. They audition in early scenes. If they can't talk, they're given less to do, or thrown out.
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Sometimes you have to admit that a relationship can't be fixed. That no matter how much you want to, you can't trust some people.
