Joseph O'Neill
Joseph O'Neill
new-york
New York interposed itself, once and for all, between me and all other places of origin.
night sky manhattan
Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.
boys boat universe
I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.
book punishment publication
Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.
book writing romance
I certainly want to continue to write in a way that's intimate. I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
summer holiday turkeys
I have been to Turkey almost every summer holiday of my life and pretty much only on summer holidays, which makes me a very shallow Turk indeed.
writing men cricket
I'm completely cricketed out. If I never have to write another word about cricket again, I'll be a happy man.
lying writing deception
Novel-writing is a bit like deception. You lie as little as you possibly can. That's the way I do it, anyway.
identity narrative term
One of the great pluses of being an immigrant is you get to start again in terms of your identity. You get to shed the narratives which cling to you.
america want preoccupation
You want a novel to tap as directly as possible into your most unspeakable preoccupations. And in America, in particular, cricket is pretty unspeakable.
long
It won't be long before we'll be deafened by the screeches of whistles being blown by whistle-blowers blowing the whistle on themselves.
special novel mediums
The greater the novel, the more it is apt to embody the special, non-replicable properties of the written medium.
writing want madness
If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it.
loss outcomes awful
I felt shame - I see this clearly, now - at the instinctive recognition in myself of an awful enfeebling fatalism, a sense that the great outcomes were but randomly connected to our endeavors, that life was beyond mending, that love was loss, that nothing worth saying was sayable, that dullness was general, that disintegration was irresistible.