Maeve Binchy was one of Ireland’s best loved writers.
Maeve Binchy
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Her books have outsold Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats and Edna O’Brien as well as being translated into 37 languages with more than 40 million copies sold.
Unsurprisingly she was never short of something to say and offered up some memorable quotes throughout her life. Here are a selection of our favourites.
Maeve Binchy quotes on writing
I write exactly as I speak, so therefore I would not say any writer influenced me at all.
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I don’t say I was ‘proceeding down a thoroughfare’, I say I ‘walked down the road’. I don’t say I ‘passed a hallowed institute of learning’, I say I ‘passed a school’. You don’t wear all your jewellery at once. You’re much more believable if you talk in your own voice.
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I believe very, very strongly that everybody is the hero/heroine of his/her own life. I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we’ve all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters.
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I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It’s the only book I didn’t finish. I couldn’t get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance.
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The fax was invented so we writers could live anywhere we liked, instead of living in London near publishers.
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I’m an escapist kind of writer.
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I also wanted to bring in the question of class-consciousness and inequality of position. The people of Ireland have no right to be class conscious.
Maeve Binchy quotes on life
We’re nothing if we’re not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing in life, really.
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I loved him (husband Gordon) and he loved me and we got married and it was great and is still great. He believed I could do anything, just as my parents had believed all those years ago, and I started to write fiction and that took off fine.
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Everybody has always loved eating in Ireland and the family always gathered around the table – which was also where all the stories were told.
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Never mind the money, the gifts of time and skill call into being the richest marketplace in the world.
It’s like if you don’t go to a dance you can never be rejected but you’ll never get to dance either.
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I often wonder that if I had met Hitler, I reckon I might have found some streak of decency in him.
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Maeve Binchy quote on how she’d like to die
On my 100th birthday, piloting (my husband) Gordon and myself into the side of a mountain.
Quotes about Maeve Binchy
She had time for everybody. Perhaps because her stories came from all of us and for all of us. Ian Rankin
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A darling. Jilly Cooper
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She rearranged a whole wall of books so it was completely full of Irish writers. She didn’t look like she was any trouble so no one caught her. Marian Keyes recalling a trip to an airport shop.
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She had that great gift of making you feel life was worth living. A very, very special person. Former politician Jeffrey Archer
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She was charming, intelligent, warm, generous in her time, with her effort, with her work. I just had the greatest of respect for her because she suffered badly from arthritis and she had a lot of pain, and she never complained, you know. Actress Brenda Fricker
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