“You are thirty minutes late.""Yes.""Would you be thirty minutes late to a wedding or a funeral?""No.""Why not, pray tell?""Well, if the funeral was mine I'd have to be on time. If the wedding was mine it would be my funeral.”

“my mother, poor fish,wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times aweek, telling me to be happy: "Henry, smile!why don't you ever smile?"and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was thesaddest smile I ever saw”

“I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.”

“You will be late for your own funeral.”

“Funerals and weddings often take place in the same location. Some would also argue that they sometimes happen at the same time too.”

“Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust.”

“An Irish wedding is a tame thing to an Irish funeral.”