Ciaran Carson Quotes

There's a whole language out there, and one's role as a writer is to stumble around in it.

Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.

How do you say a thing at all, at the end of the day? How do you say what's in your mind? And as soon as you say what you actually have in mind, it's wrong, isn't it?

I am reminded, now, of Leonardo's advice to painters: You should fix your eyes, he says, on certain walls stained with damp. You will see in these the likenesses of divine landscapes, adorned with mountains, ruins, rocks, extensive plains; and you will see there battles and strange figures engaged in violent actions. For in such walls the same thing happens as in the sound of church bells, in whose reverberations you may find every word imaginable.