Kevin Barry Quotes

The fundamental human truth underpinning ‘Ox Mountain Death Song‘ is that men so very often turn into their fathers. The way that everything gets passed down.

In my very early days as a journalist, as a cub reporter on a local newspaper, I used to cover the district courthouse in Limerick city – all human life passed through that establishment, and my time there remains a source of inspiration.

I greatly enjoyed working as a freelance journalist, because it gets you out of the house, and it gets you talking to people, but it wasn’t satisfying all of my cravings, and I knew that I needed to work with the other side of my brain – the darker, murkier side!

What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it’s a far harder form.

It was quite risky to open the book with one of my quieter stories; I’m kind of trying, I think, to lure readers into a false sense of security and then assault them with a couple really loud, really strange stories.

There’s no mistaking the fact that some of the best longform fiction out there now is in American television. ‘The Wire‘ and ‘Deadwood’ and ‘The Sopranos.’

I was a cub reporter on a local newspaper in Limerick city, and I used to cover the district court meetings. All of life passed through the Limerick courthouse. Misery, malevolence, the dark side of humanity… I tell ya, it made ‘Angela’s Ashes‘ look like ‘The Wonderful World of Disney.’

I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.

Don DeLillo’s ‘White Noise,’ which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.

I think journalism is useful training for a writer in the way it takes the preciousness out of the pragmatic side of the craft.

I have been as influenced by music and films as by books.

At one point I would read nothing that was not by the great American Jews – Saul Bellow, Philip Roth – which had a disastrous effect of making me think I needed to write the next great Jewish American novel. As a ginger-haired child in the West of Ireland, that didn’t work out very well, as you can imagine.

One of the things I’ve been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it’s some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.

I think the language as spoken in Limerick and Cork has not really been written; ‘City of Bohane’ is a combination of the two. Bohane is a little kingdom. When I began writing it, I realised that it was in the future and that it was a place that didn’t care about anything that happened outside it.

Frazzled and delirious, as I’ve just finished a new book of stories. I feel like Moses staggering down the mountainside with the tablets of stone.

Irish writing is so strong that it can feel like the country has all been covered, but in fact, there are so many gaps. The small west of Ireland cities and the working classes there have almost never appeared in Irish literature, simply because those communities were never in the way of producing books.

I don’t quite operate within the realist mode. I kind of push the stories out towards the cusp of believability – that’s the area of interest for me.

I was writing fiction in my 20s but in a pretty undisciplined way – late at night, maybe, after I’d peeled myself from the walls of a nightclub and crawled home along the gutters. But I slowly became more serious and more devout in my work, and I fell seriously in love with the short story form.

Very first thing in the morning, I spew some rough genius directly on to the laptop. Then I have coffee and rewrite for three hours.

I have always felt a special affinity with V. S. Pritchett. He worked from the ear, primarily, as I do, and he was an all-rounder, writing short stories, novels, memoir, travelogue, critical biography. He lived to be almost 100, and he never stopped, and his work is unified by a great generosity of spirit.

Libraries are where we learn that we can live our lives through books.

I go into my workroom seven mornings a week. There will only be one or two mornings a week where it seems to be going well, but to earn those days you have to go through slow, slodgy days where your mind feels like porridge.