YouSaid · the spoken record

JP Donleavy

lines on the record: 44
first: 2007-03-04
most recent: 2007-03-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I thought the most practical little thing would be an orange squeezer or something like that, because those things I find in my life do become something I'm indispensable. I've noticed I have a long spoon with a tiny little sort of end to the spoon when I use it to make dressings garlic dressings normally.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I might have to say something awful something I often find myself looking through is the nineteen seventy two Social Register of New York which would make me sound like an awful snar, but it's only to check on people whose grave sights in various cemeteries in New York I know about or have visited or something like that for architectural reasons and then finding out where they lived, you see while they were alive.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will this again comes from my looking for music to suit certain things in a play and it's again fair tales of New York where this music is playing in the background and this Clarence Vine figure says it's my favourite music I've chosen. Isn't she very beautiful?”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'm doing that more than ever. It's like the most unbelievable thing I had an exhibition a short while ago and the price of”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a pretty lonely business, and it's very isolating. It's not good for you, and I think isolation which happens to all writers, it's inevitable that they all suffer from that at some stage.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the only news one ever gets of such situations is always sort of gossip or something like that, but I did read very recently in Kara, this is the Aolingus magazine. I have a great big photograph of mister Depp, and there he is on the cover, and he does actually say that's what he's going to do. And then at the end of it he describes me what a wonderful person I am.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the humming chorus from Madame Butterfly comes about in the same way that one or two of the other pieces do, namely associated with a production of mine of fairy tales in New York, the play, and I just remember it from whence Susan Hampshire was the young lady who played this role, and if she's on stage, her boyfriend has vanished away, and she said as this piece of music began to get played, that her eyes at one point would go out over the audience and she'd see the audience sparkling, and she realized it was like diamonds tears and everyone's eyes through the scene.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well yes I'm not someone who volunteers to attack people on quite the opposite but when I am attacked I do react pretty kind of Seriously”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well it could never end the battles continued there were delays of all kinds of things. Suddenly one day arrived that the Olympia press was up for sale in Paris and I sent my wife and my secretary over to Paris with a lot of money and they bought it in the auction and now you're looking at the owner of the Olympia Press Paris”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever it is the book in reading the ginger man you get up and live again. You don't die in bed after reading that book”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Usually that, yes, that and slightly outrageous four letter words, and so on, and the general reality of it, I think, made anything that was obscene in the book become far more communicating to people. That was the thing that people don't realize, that even today they get shocked and so on. It's because of the reality of it. And the other strange case with my things where I take myself seriously as an author is simply this is that so many people's lives had been saved by the books, and they all are almost the same story of men lying in beds. Dying, and somebody comes into the room with a bag full of books and dumps the books on their bed, and says here read these, and they've all survived”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think closer to forty five publishers It was turned down by nearly everyone, I suppose the censorship at the time prevented a lot of people from doing anything with it, considering for publication.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of my music that I choose has come from the fact that you are trying to look for things to use in productions of various things. And I'm always looking for things.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, I had to bank up my mind as I wrote the book to put down on the page something that had a realism of it in other words I wasn't trying to be outrageous in any way it was just reportage in a sense and to report it as briefly as clearly as one could to be absorbed by a reader who would see it there on the page”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I could understand it. He was very one thing, he was a mesmerizing person if he went into a public house. He literally anyone there, no matter who they were, he could engage them in conversation and change that man into one of the most extraordinary people in the world just listening to him and the conversation that would go back and forth, and most of the things that descended upon him was just literally a lack of a private income.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well it could have been the fact that you realize that the time was now going to pass after the war the peace had come to Europe and the time that we were all enjoying at universities and that world and the period was ending and going to be over and that must have been a force behind my interest in just recreating that and holding on to it in some way.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a piece which I'm always reminded because I guess my closest, longest friend lives down in Wales and so my attachments to Wales comes through him, you see, and I just thought well deserves to be reminded that these associations of things one celebrates after so many years, and I'm presently doing it now.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I was aware that you couldn't do this and paint or write or do anything, and it became I imposed discipline upon myself in those early days.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I wasn't I had bought this little place small holding out in Wicklow, and I became a country liver, and so every once in a while I would continue to go into Dublin, but never the activity of Trinity College because I married at such an early age I was still at Trinity.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I couldn't didn't know what to make of him. He never kind of in any way adjusted to being proper or as so called, and if someone if he did get a new suit which he did once, someone said you've got a new suit on, have you? Oh, and he got upset over this. He went out and immediately in the gutter, rolled over a few times, came back in and his suit all in a state of certain dilapidation, I suppose. But then people complained about his condition in the pub, so he reached over and took his pint of port aginas and poured it down on the top of his head and said, I'm taking a shower now. That was being anything that he might say or do he would capitalize on immediately. And he was tremendous entertainment.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I met him I think we were introduced to each other as writers, and this was sort of in those days to call yourself a writer anywhere in Dublin was to invite instant ridicule for the rest of your life, and so it took a short time before insults were exchanged back and forth. Suddenly we were invited out each other out in the middle of the street outside of Devin Burns to fight, and being very wisely at that point said, you know, he said there isn't a single one of them in the purpose Bartha to come out and watch us fight, so Bean and I didn't fight and we became pals to another pub and had a drink.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, this is a piece of music I think that was recommended to me by somebody who probably thought my taste of music was so appalling that perhaps I ought to have something which was a bit more dignified and sophisticated. So this is not, I suppose, a choice I could claim for myself.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hardly hardly and of course then the lectures were, you know, I suppose like Oxford and Cambridge the same kind of methods they used, you could either attend or not attend, and they had some quite famed people at Trinity in those days ETS Walton who first split the atom with Lord Rutherford J. Bronte Gatey one of the greatest zoologists of the time. So Trinity had a sort of an aura about it.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Yes, the skip, as they call them, your college servant had to go out and get a bucket and bring buckets up to your rooms at Trinity, and if you had to use the lavatory, you had to go two hundred yards out in the cold winter to what I'd call the latrines. It was a pretty rough rife”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was mesmerized by it, and I found in my undergraduate years that I would go off walking in Dublin, I would actually patrol through the most appalling slums that you could ever find or imagine could exist, and for some reason they fascinated me. But any American who came to Ireland in those days toilet paper was the major thing straight away, but I never complained about anything. I was mesmerized by it, and”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I got out of the navy to apply to universities they were all booked up full, and I just one day asked my mother were there any universities in Ireland. She said yes, Trinity College Dublin and I wrote off and they said come over”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well I have this red army ensemble singing Annie Lori and the combination I suppose my interest in the Russian choirs came from my friend Gaines Stephen Christ who loved Ruts the Russian music and suddenly this came up I don't know how I ever got this vinyl I think it is of the Russian Red Armies singing Annie Lori but I realized that I was probably listening to one of the greatest tenants of all time who sings this.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's slightly faster than it used to be because now I seem to practice more having to demonstrate as people don't believe you”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that, and when I did throw it you couldn't see the punch. I mean, my punches were literally like such lightning that you couldn't see them, and that disturbed people.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, yes, be attacked. I wouldn't attack someone. I'd warn them off and so on. But it would end up in a fight. And so as they went on, my reputation in Dublin got to a point where some man who had been at Arnham parachuted at Arnham, I remember this vividly. I think he was about six foot seven inches tall or something. He heard about it say, Where is this guy? The people here said there he is over there. And he said these words he said that little guy and the man next to him said That's what they all say. and there was no fight”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it didn't particularly frighten me, but the thing about me was simply this is that I grew abed when I left the US Navy, but in Ireland I was the only man in Ireland with a beard, and I could never go to a pub without some voice saying why have you got that beard? That would always lead to a fight. But all these fighters are always.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was always going on because my closest friend, a gentleman called Tommy Gill, we would always go down to the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club and get in the ring and go a few rounds with summer.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was a bad influence on the student body, evidently. I think I tried to start something like a fraternity, and my younger brother was also at this same prep school, and they threw him out as well just to get rid of both of us.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even to this day it worries me that Stephen Foster, one of America's great composers, was found dead on a New York street with ten cents in his pocket when he died, and I've never recovered from this image of this marvellous composer. I've always liked to listen to any of his music. It always has moved me, knowing about his life.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So as an author you always looked for the ideal places to work. That literally is how it's come about, and the most practical thing in the world is not to have people bothering you. you get a big mansion surrounded by all the land. you can get a hold of. So I have practically fifteen square miles or so.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But not in the least they never brought up Ireland to me I never heard of Ireland, I never heard of I never knew any Irish people nothing to do with Ireland. When I grew up you were taught how to dine at tables and duke. Everything that was sort of the acceptable behaviour of America.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we lived in a place where it was the highest hill in the Bronx, and we moved from there to this small hill. to call lawn, separated from New York. by open countryside practically. And we even, as I grew up My young friends I didn't trap myself. but they had trapping lines and sell furs to the Hudson Bay Company at the end of the summer. though the life was very rural and I learned how Indian lived, how you played, and we behaved and grew up like American Indians.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it wasn't that so much, no, it was a skill that one honed. I grew up in a very kind of I don't misdrive it now as a lavish, exciting background in New York City. There's a picture of me because of the business of being born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bron It gives a totally different picture how I did grow up in New York. My background in New York was fabled almost beyond belief. And I became a boxer on a boxing table. and then at the New York Athletic Cub. And so that was my background was a sport that won.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fonham Youth Choir I was one sad, very sad Christmas period. I don't usually observe Christmas at all in us say children are around and Everyone was away from where I live as a big isolated mansion in Ireland, and suddenly it got very sad and kind of depressing. And so Suddenly this piece of music was being by this sad Youth choir, and I was just stunned by hearing it, and it became one of my favourite pieces of music. and I learn much later that resource her piece of music. favoured by the mottled say for the gingermain called Again a Stephen Criss and it turned out to be his favourite music that I had no idea about.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, indeed, and that wasn't for the purpose of keeping his feet dry as he used to say himself, but I hate getting my feet wet. I filled up a trunk with your shoes and walked to the pub which is a mile away, and every say fifty, sixty hundred yards the shoes would get wet, I took them or threw them in the field and on a dry pair, and he said I got to the pub with my feet dry.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turned out I was furious at first over all this advice, but and later discovered that I followed every single suggestion made.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was indeed a broke into my cottage in Kilco where I had a studio, and I was away for three days, came back, found the interior of the cottage in total disarray, then I went out to my studio and I saw. Manuscript One next to mine, and I opened it up and there was the word Bostal, and I knew whose manuscript it was immediately, and it was Bian's, and he was the first to Read it and had a pencil ready made corrections and suggestions throughout the manuscript which I still have obviously, and then he autographed it.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beware, yes, because you'd always use the term the pubs were jammed which they were, and in my case there was a great party always being held down the street in somebody's place and so on, and Dublin was full of that in those days.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not sure that that's actually true, but certainly in those days after the war coming to Ireland and Dublin, Dublin was on fate, and people approached it from all over the world, and so you had a really strange convention of human beings in the city of Dublin.”
2007-03-04 · Desert Island Discs · JP Donleavy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source