The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and to influence their actions.

Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had Mother Church ranks at the very top a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism... to ward off threats to her own security and influence.

I felt Joyce was an influence on my fiction but in a very general way as a kind of inspiration and a model for the beauty of language.

Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.

When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms the lustre of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven and the influence of her power it is in vain to resist.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera theater music and dance are thriving all over the world but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art poems schools theology displacing all that exists or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.

What I dream of is an art of balance of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing calming influence on the mind rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.