James Joyce on Fenianism (1907)

Doodles by Samuel Beckett, including a scribble of James Joyce

In 1907, aged 25, James Joyce wrote 'The Last Fenian'  and remarked upon the enduring struggle between violent and constitutional nationalism: 

"Anyone who studies the history of the Irish revolution during the nineteenth century finds himself faced with a double struggle — the struggle of the Irish nation against the English government, and the struggle, perhaps no less bitter, between the moderate patriots and the so-called party of physical force. This party under different names: ‘White Boys’, ‘Men of ‘98’, ‘United Irishmen’, ‘Invincibles’, ‘Fenians’, has always refused to be connected with either the English political parties or the Nationalist parliamentarians. They maintain (and in this assertion history fully supports them) that any concessions that have been granted to Ireland, England has granted unwillingly, and, as it is usually put, at the point of a bayonet."

George Orwell on Ireland

Cartoon of George Orwell by famous American political cartoonist, Pat Oliphant

George Orwell wrote that the execution of the Easter Rising leaders was "a crime and mistake". He believed that the dispute over Ulster was caused by "the expansionist racist nature of modern republicanism." In a review of Sean O'Casey's autobiography by George Orwell in the Observer, Orwell wrote in 1945:

"Why is it that the worst extremes of jingoism and racialism have to be tolerated when they come from an Irishman?"

Will Self - Art is theft, Ctd

Kingsley Amis by Anglo-Polish impressionist painter Feliks Topolski

Will Self (@wself) said during a panel conversation on Dubliners by James Joyce:

"Being pray to the anxiety of influence - and if any writer tells you that she or he doesn’t suffer from the anxiety of influence then they’re a stone-cold liar."

He explained how W.H. Auden notoriously used to write "GETS" in the margins of books for "Good Enough To Steal":

"W.H. Auden notoriously used to write in the marginalia "GETS", in the margins of books for "Good Enough To Steal". So I most re-read James Joyce’s Dubliners to steal stuff."

Will Self also explained that he likes to think he's a good enough writer to thieve. He said in the Guardian:

Sean O'Casey - Writing gets harder the more you do it

Irish writer Sean O'Casey and his wife Eileen Reynolds

Sean O'Casey, playwright born in the tenement slums of Dublin, said:

"When I write a new play. When I sit down to try to write a new play, I’ve had the experience of many plays before. Yet that new play that I am going to try to write gives me the same agony, the same trouble, the, same effort, the same Herculean work as the very first play I ever wrote gave to me."

Christopher Hitchens said the same thing:

"I hate to agree with George Will about this… The truth is, yes there is nothing like not writing for making you unhappy and if you have the compulsion then the only problem that you’ll have is, you surrender to this compulsion more and more and, you’ll find [writing] gets harder the more you do it. That seems a shame. It should get easier, it should become more like a facility for example. It becomes more difficult and it becomes more difficult because you are reading more and more work by better and better people and you’ve lost the sheer nerve and the blind solipsism that allowed you to think you could try it when you were young before you had made any proper comparisons. So it gets much more nerve wracking and much more difficult in every way costly for you and no doubt for your readers."

Samuel Beckett on writing more generally said in 1954:

"It’s hard to go on with everything loathed and repudiated as soon as formulated, and in the act of formulation, and before formulation."

Beckett also wrote:

"I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding."