Top 490 Irish Quotes

I’m a product of my Irish culture, and I could no more lose that than I could my sense of identity.

Well, I couldn’t speak English before I went to Belfast. So I learned English with a Northern Irish accent.

Hats are the epitome of Englishness, and a royal wedding is the penultimate moment for a hat designer. I’m Irish, but I am a royalist and I believe in fantasy.

I grew up middle class – my dad was a high school teacher; there were five kids in our family. We all shared a nine-hundred-square-foot home with one bathroom. That was exciting. And my wife is Irish Catholic and also very, very barely middle class.

I grew up in Manchester in a big Irish family – there are seven of us in all – so my life has always been about role-playing, about doing anything for a laugh. I’m always joking about; that’s the way I am.

After my son died, I went to a psychiatrist. He proved – or I proved – that Sigmund Freud was correct when he said that the Irish are impervious to psychoanalysis.

The glory of the old Irish nation, which in our hour will grow young and strong again. Should we fail, the country will not be worth more than it is now. The sword of famine is less sparing than the bayonet of the soldier.

I always think of Ireland as a place for complex ideas and prose. I like Irishness. I like Irish culture and Irish literature.

They just love the Irish accent in the States. But I just talk really fast because I’m from Cork. It’s my speed that really throws them, especially when I get nervous. Doing interviews there is really hard because you can’t hear a word I’m saying!

After school, instead of going into the restaurant scene, I very consciously took my guitar around everywhere I could, to Irish pubs and restaurants, and I played four nights a week to make ends meet.

Ballet Hispanico is far from Irish, and, though it has strong dancers, its Spanishness has always left me unconvinced.

The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted blood of all the world.

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: ‘If she writes anything else, do let us know.’ Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

I feel myself part of something. Not only being part of a community but part of an actual moment and a movement of Irish writing and art. That sense of being part of the whole thing is the deepest joy.

I gotta lot of Black Irish in me.

I have a bit of a love affair with fairy tales and some of the ideas of Irish mythology, like Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, who captured a lot of that very beautifully.

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.

I wasn’t embraced as an Irish artist back in the Moloko days. Modern electronica isn’t what you think of when you think of Irish music.

There’s a lot of Irish in London and have been for years – they’re very much a part of the city.

I make a mean Irish soda bread every Christmas and give it out to friends and family.

There might well have been an Irish great-great-grandfather of mine back then in the 1800s.

Nationalism of the Irish type is often regarded as reactionary. With the World Revolution and the Classless Society waiting for the midwife, why take a torch to the stable to assist at the birth of a puppy? Even if the puppy is pedigree. On this question I am unable to make up my mind.

I would never accuse the Irish people of being in any way stupid.

The Irish Catholic side was married to the life of an actor and I found out acting could be a form of prayer.

It’s incredible being a woman. I was, of course, fortunate to have an Irish mother who is an empowered woman. She comes from the western culture where women’s rights and empowerment happened much earlier in the 19th century.

For every successful actor or actress, there are countless numbers who don’t make it. The name of the game is rejection. You go to an audition and you’re told you’re too tall or you’re too Irish or your nose is not quite right. You’re rejected for your education, you’re rejected for this or that and it’s really tough.

I am not in the business of pointing fingers or making excuses. However, recent history has shown that I, like thousands of others in Ireland, incorrectly relied upon the persons who guided Anglo and who wrongfully sought to portray a ‘blue chip’ Irish banking sector.

The fact is, I’ve always felt more British than Irish. Maybe it was the way I was brought up, I don’t know, but I have always felt more of a connection with the U.K. than with Ireland.

I have a difficult time doing an Irish accent; even now, it kind of fades slowly into Scottish.

My heritage is Scottish and a lot of Irish, too.

I loved Jack Ford. I got him in his later days, and he was a total tyrant and a total autocrat and an Irish drunk. But I had a great time.

I became an American citizen three years ago, and if I’d been arrested, maybe that wouldn’t have happened. That was a very proud moment, by the way. I still have my Irish passport, but becoming an American citizen was important in terms of my family.

I’m still an Irish republican; I absolutely believe in Irish unity and am working to achieve that. But over the course of 15 years or more, people like myself and others have been working to end the vicious cycle of conflict.

If you ask me where do I belong, it would be somewhere in the Irish Sea almost – born in Hong Kong, Chinese mother, Portuguese father from Macao, lived in Europe most of my life.

I have Czech, I have Russian, I have English, I have Italian. Uh, what am I missing? A little bit of Irish. The Russian is Jewish. So I’m your classic American mutt.

The Irish and British, they love satire, it’s a large part of the culture.

It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.

Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education. Whether it’s the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It’s where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American.

I’m such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I’ve got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish.

The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotts as a joke, but the Scotts haven’t seen the joke yet.

Father Ted’ was written by Irish people, so that was fine, but around the time we were shooting it ‘EastEnders’ went to Ireland and represented it as this terribly backward society where people were going around with one eye and drunk.

They believed that Britain was in Ireland defending their own interests, therefore the Irish had the right to use violence to put them out. My argument was that that type of thinking was out of date.

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

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don’t just say white. They give you a math equation. ‘Well, I’m a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.’

I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish – we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.

I love a lot of Irish folk music and Irish folk songs.

Growing up, I was your classic Catholic Irish kid. I went to mass every Sunday. Then in secondary school I went to boarding school, and there was mass seven days a week before breakfast – it may have put me off!

I think now, more than anytime I can remember, bands are sounding pretty similar whether they’re English or American, from Manchester or London… or Leeds or Welsh or Irish.

I’m a history buff, so I’ve been reading lots of books on Irish and American history.

Rain is also very difficult to film, particularly in Ireland because it’s quite fine, so fine that the Irish don’t even acknowledge that it exists.

The lion’s share of the damage to the Irish economy was the fault of domestic, economic, and financial mismanagement.

The problem with being Irish… is having ‘Riverdance’ on your back. It’s a burden at times.

I remember as a kid being asked if I was Jewish or Irish. I said, like the glib little 15-year-old I was, ‘You can be both.’ Feeling very pleased with myself. Before they smacked me.

The novel space is a pure space. I’m nobody once I go into that room. I’m not gay, I’m not bald, I’m not Irish. I’m not anybody. I’m nobody. I’m the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It’s to get that person to feel what I’m trying to dramatize.

When I went to America, I spoke so much about who I was and gave so much away in a confessional, Irish, story-telling way that I suddenly realised I had given up a lot of myself. I had to shut up.