Tom Paulin Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“One of the strongest features of Puritanism is its autobiographical tendency, its passionate self-regard.”

“Teachers are the ministers and priests of culture, its practitioners and its emissaries.”

“I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer's life. On the other hand, it's good to have another job. It gives you something to do.”

“In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction.”

“Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions - the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.”

“I do think culture is an argument, and that was part of the way I was brought up. People at a social occasion in Ireland will start shouting and arguing. When the Yeats family lived in Bedford Park, they had to go round to the neighbours to say, 'You might think we are fighting, but this is the way we talk to each other.'”

“If you spend your life with academics, when you step outside, you realise there is this huge general readership that is almost impossible to reach with critical writing. It is a rare critical monograph that gets a general readership, and if you spend your life as a teacher, the central value is communication. And there are different forms of it.”

“Many black people I know are proud of the Irish part of their heritage - an Irish grandparent, say - but they recognise that many people believe in a form of racial purity. And it is from that belief that prejudice starts.”

“My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the 'Guardian' and the 'New Statesman,' listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn't get a television until 'That Was The Week That Was' started. There was nothing to do but read.”

“I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.”