The pity is the public will demand and find a moral in my book - or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead …

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

There is no surer way to misread any document than to read it literally. ... As nearly as we can, we must put ourselves in the place of those who uttered the w…

In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.

A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.