I remember, as a child, a particular groan that my father would sound when he crawled from the bed in the morning. I hear the same groan now, precisely, every morning, when I emerge from my own lair. It’s more than an expression of physical weariness – it’s an aching of the soul. Even the groans get passed down. Kevin Barry Read Quote
City of Bohane’ has been optioned for film, and I’ve finished a first draft of the script. Kevin Barry Read Quote
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. Kevin Barry Read Quote
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! Kevin Barry Read Quote
When you wake up, instead of checking emails on your phone, or counting your retweets, pick up a pen and scratch a few sentences into a notebook. Kevin Barry Read Quote
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. Kevin Barry Read Quote
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. Kevin Barry Read Quote
In the early nineties, I was a cub reporter on a city newspaper in Limerick, and assigned to the courthouse there. One day, an old detective sergeant came and whispered to me in the press pit. He pointed out a young offender, a teenager who was up for stealing a car or something relatively minor, and said, ‘See this kid? He’ll kill.’ Kevin Barry Read Quote
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. Kevin Barry Read Quote
