Brendan Behan Quotes

I'm a drinker with writing problems.

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.

It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.

They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues...

When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

I have never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn't make it worse.

Every cripple has his own way of walking.

I saw a sign that said 'Drink Canada Dry'. So I did.

I only drink on two occasions—when I'm thirsty and when I'm not.

Ah, bless you, Sister, may all your sons be bishops.

There is no such thing as bad publicity...except your own obituary

Every man, through fear, mugs his aspirations a dozen times a day.

It's a queer world, God knows, but the best we have to be going on with.

An author's first duty is to let down his country.

Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.

What's a crook, only a businessman without a shop.

I didn’t spend a lifetime studying theology, but I know that the Church was always against Ireland and for the British Empire.

Me blood was up and me country in my knuckles

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

Compliments pass when the quality meet.

If you have a talent, use it in every which way possible. Don't hoard it. Don't dole it out like a miser. Spend it lavishly like a millionaire intent on going broke.

If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.

People take to hard work as easily as to drink. It’s a matter of getting used to it. It didn’t make them like Tom a

Liars need good memories, and I have one.

Don't speak of your Protestant minister, Nor of his church without meaning or faith, For the foundation stone of his temple Was the bollocks of Henry VIII Brendan Behan

In my childhood I could remember the whole week a damn sight better than I can now for all my family were in the Rising. And they told the stories to such good effect that I was in there with them… Now I have learned enough arithmetic to know that I could not possibly have taken part in an event which happened seven years before I was born, and it saddens me.

OK, you don’t know me, so you’ll have to take my word for it that I’m not stupid. I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. I like Faulkner and Dickens and Vonnegut and Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas.

But the best book I ever saw in the nick was the Bible. When I was in Brixton on remand, I ’ad one in the flowery. Smashing thin paper for rolling dog-ends in. I must ’ave smoked my way through the book of Genesis, before I went to court.

If I was willing to serve Mass, it was in memory of my ancestors standing around a rock, in a lonely glen, for fear of the landlords and their yeomen, or sneaking through a back-lane in Dublin, and giving the pass-word, to hear Mass in a slum public-house, when a priest’s head was worth five pounds and an Irish Catholic had no existence in law.

A good start is half the work.

When I came back to Dublin, I was court martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so said they could shoot me in my absence.

When I came back to Dublin, I was court martialed in my absence, and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.

All publicity is good, except your own obituary.

I'm not a politician. I only have one face.

I always get grateful and pious in good weather and this was the kind of day you'd know that Christ for you.

This, in the language of the poet, is where he dropped a ballock.

One of the Fenian prisoners said the things you missed most in jail were babies, dogs and fires.

Grip tight and hold on, said Tom Clark. I'd do my best. Clarke held on for fifteen years, and lived to fight the bastards on more equal terms in Easter Week.

I'd be like God and pay my debts without money, with a good kick up in the ball for a beginning, what they called in the slums at home 'a Ringsend uppercut'.

You can’t go wrong in choosing anything, and I love people who dodge all the gender-imperative rubbish that society torments us all with. I love the fact that he didn’t think heterosexuality resolved anything at all, meaning, I assume, that he didn’t think it was enough just to be heterosexual. You read him and you are immediately convinced that the rest of the world is suffering a mass mental illness. I love writers like that.

He was a dark man, not very old, and very hard in an English way that tries to be dignified and a member of a master race that would burn a black man alive or put a pregnant woman out the side of the road in the interests of stern duty.

It’s great to be on your own for a bit, in the sun, and in the country. That’s one thing you never were in Walton. Nor in any prison, I suppose. For all their solitary confinement you were watched and your every movement – even at times when you’d give a dog a bit of privacy. What they call in Irish—’uaigneas gan ciuneas’— loneliness without peace.

I sat beside Charlie. Opposite us, in the Black Maria, was a red-haired boy of my own age, and a small man with a broken nose, a cauliflower ear, and a begrudging look. He was going up for kicking his wife. He was not unfriendly, and told me his name was Donohoe. I said that by a coincidence that was my mother’s name. It was not her name, but civility costs nothing.

Don’t ’oo call me a Culchie,’ said Parry between his teeth, and ferociously, but he could have said it from between the two cheeks of his arse, and twice as ferociously at that stage of the game, for all I cared. Because I had him weighed up and it was clearly a case of have him now or be persecuted by him for as long as I’d be within reach of him. Now, it was, or never, as the man said; die dog or shite the licence.

Charlie put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. ‘You’re a rum bastard, Paddy.’ ‘Them,’ said I, ‘are the truest words you ever said.’ We walked over some more sand heaps and, at last, 538 Jones stood on the top, looking down at the sea, as if he’d made it himself. We stood beside him and looked down at the sun on the water. ‘Me life on you, Jonesy,’ said I. ‘You’re like Stout Cortez when with eagle eyes, he stared at the Pacific—and all his men looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent, upon a peak in Darien. By Jasus, this equals any fughing Darien.

I jumped to one side and before he could rise properly gave him a kick from each boot into the guts. I could not get the side of his head because the bastard was cute enough to have that above the level of my boot. Then I struck him with my head in the face as often as I could, for this was my only chance with this fughpig. He tried to rise and got his arm around my neck and threw me with me under him and tried to get his knee in but my thigh was covering my balls. This, said I, in my own mind, is where Brendan goes down for the third time, and if he does he does not come up. ‘Up, up! Out of it, you pair of bloody savages.’ Tessie O’Shea, me life on you, sweetest voice in the land of Erin, or East Anglia or any goddamn place. He came down into the cutting and pulled Parry up. He got in a last dig at me as his grip was loosened, and I went for him with my fists, letting on there was still tight in me. The screw (that he may be blessed now and for ever more, amen) caught the two of us by the scruff of the neck—or the scruffs of our necks, for now that it was over and Parry damaged a little bit, I was lightheaded and happy—and he said, ‘You dirty pair of animals.

I’ll James you, you foxy-faced drippings of a cankered __, you poxy bastarding whore’s melt, I put it to myself, and thought it worth it to hit him a belt; but, when all is said and done, I was but sixteen and he was a grown man and had come through Borstal institutions, mostly, I would say, by sucking up to bullying big bollixes the likes of Dale, not by letting his backstraps down—he was too ugly for that, but maybe some of these bastards would get a bit of a drop. I was no country Paddy from the middle of the Bog of Allen to be frightened to death by a lot of Liverpool seldom-fed bastards, nor was I one of your wrap-the-green-flag-round-me junior Civil Servants that came into the IRA from the Gaelic League, and well ready to die for their country any day of the week, purity in their hearts, truth on their lips, for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland. No, be Jesus, I was from Russell Street, North Circular Road, Dublin, from the Northside where, be Jesus, the likes of Dale wouldn’t make a dinner for them, where the whole of this pack of Limeys would be scruff-hounds would be et, bet, and threw up again __et without salt. I’ll James you, you bastard. Then the smile had to fade and the joke was rejected and the gentleness refused, never a better nor my own sweet self, and it wasn’t off the stones I licked. The old fellow would beat the best of them round our way and him only my height now, though fully grown a hell of a long time. James, be Jesus, prepare to meet thy Jesus. And I just stood up, held up a bag and said, ‘Finished work,’ and the screw nodded, though I hadn’t said ‘sir’ because I hadn’t time.

Stoned Soup by Stewart Stafford Keith Richards talks Brendan Behan, Making soup, wrapped in a blanket, While in a kitchen in County Cork, Mick Jagger listens and laughs loudly. Discussing the previous night’s gig, Mick says the crowd was wonderful, Keith agrees and says so was Charlie, Keith’s lip cigarette jigs to each word. Through choking plumes of smoke, The soup is ready, Mick tries some, His notable lips curl downwards fast, He humours Keith and says it’s great. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

How's the body, kid?

But the hair style didn’t frighten me, for he was long enough out of Sherwood for it to have grown again, and he must be keeping it that way, to scare people; which it did, but not this citizen.

I was like a man gaining money with each day that brought me towards the spring.

It was more luck than good management