Quotes of the year

From Jack Nicholson's Irish roots to the Hugh Lane Gallery's spit-shine techniques - the wisest, wildest and wackiest quotes of the year from 'Irish Times' interviews by Eileen Battersby, Donald Clarke, Tony Clayton-Lea, Peter Crawley, Michael Dervan, Aidan Dunne, Michael Dwyer, Sara Keating, Siobhán Long, Belinda McKeon, Michael Seaver and Arminta Wallace

"I was the 'most promising newcomer' for some years. I was always 'one to watch. There's a kiss of death. When you get on that list you are usually dead."

- Daniel Craig

"I'm the wrong person to ask what the play's about. It's about an hour and a half long, as Dylan Thomas would say." - Playwright Billy Roche on his new play, Lay Me Down Softly

"My great-grandmother was completely dumb. She was so shocked when the Cossacks marched into her house and raped the women that she never spoke another word - in her life, actually." - Lucie Skeaping of the group The Burning Bush on her Jewish roots

"How many of Moore's Irish Melodies can you name? Most people would be hard-pressed to get half a dozen." - Pianist Una Hunt in the year of Thomas Moore's bicentenary

"I thought it would be easy to establish a ballet company in Ireland - that people would jump in, because they'd see that that was what was missing from their culture. That was my mistake." - Günther Falusy on setting up Ballet Ireland in 1997

The people I'm drawn to in traditional music have a kind of iconoclastic bent in their nature . . . They do very unusual things to the tradition, but all too often, there's a lot of the same old thing. The 'wow' factor is all too rare." - Sean nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird

"I come from the Lynchs of Sligo. You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo." - Jack Nicholson

"It's symbolic of how I feel, with cameras on every street corner. Being watched all the time, having my sense of freedom invaded. Privacy is an important thing, and it has been eroded over the past few years. Now they're talking about body scans at airports. Democracy becomes a sham the second you have to give way to authorities who can do any kind of search that they want with you." - Nitin Sawhney on his album London Undersound

"It was like a seesaw the way he could create such great beauty in his writing and cause so much damage in his day-to-day life." - Matthew Rhys on playing Dylan Thomas in The Edge of Love

The US and the world just didn't deserve these people. They're a good deal worse. They don't even know the rules. - Randy Newman on the Bush administration

"I think the general view is that if this was something designed to enhance the institutions, if it arose out of a study about how they operate, pointing out inefficiencies and potential improvements, that would be welcome, but that is not the case." - Imma director Enrique Juncosa on the plan to amalgamate Imma, the National Gallery of Ireland and the Crawford Art Gallery

"Working as a full-time musician is like warfare: it's 90 per cent boredom and 10 per cent terror." - Sometime singer-songwriter Nick Kelly

"The greatest heckle I ever got was at a book reading when a kid put his hand up and said, 'Does this get good soon?'" - Comedian David O'Doherty

"I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal." - Seamus Heaney

"In the US if you're a flute player, you're a bottom feeder, you just take whatever work you can get, in the lousiest orchestras, whatever. To use a northern term, I was scunnered at the gigs I was having to play, and I thought I can do this better myself. With the impunity of ignorance, that's how I started the Camerata. It's the classic story of if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have attempted it." - Flautist Adrian Spence, founder of the Camerata Pacifica ensemble

"Books were always important. I have to thank my father, he filled my life with books. He didn't write but he always read. He was a merchant, he filled the store with cigarette smoke and his friends, all talking about books and politics. It was bad for business. He dealt in women's clothing." - Impac Dublin Literary Award winner Rawi Hage

"The star quality shines off Colin the minute he walks in the door. It's radiant. I think his stardom has surprised him more than anybody." - Casting director Ros Hubbard (left) on choosing Colin Farrell for his first two screen roles

"The thing about theatre is that it's all totally fake. The people up on stage are acting. The lights are fake. The things on stage are just props. And yet it holds together . . . It's like in church, where the bread is changed into body, the wine into blood. It's that whole ceremony that I love." - Enda Walsh

"If evolution works, why are monkeys still around?" - Terrence Howard, co-star of Iron Man

"When you're over 40, it's too late to be in a pop band . . . There's something sinister about people of a certain age being in a pop band. An old rocker in a leather jacket seems fine to me - the Rolling Stones, U2, and so on, can do that. But I've made pop music all my life and old guys in pop is sinister to me." - Paul Heaton

"We watched as the Bush administration took advantage of the feelings aroused by 9/11 and exploited them shamelessly: tied Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda; lied and deceived and overturned civil rights without any restraint; and took the law into their own hands. And there was no critical reaction from the American people. It was as if the country had frozen up and become docile and unquestioning. That has been the biggest shock of all." - Novelist Patrick McGrath on a horrible decade for American liberals

"Choral music and choral concerts need to tell a story. Because, after all, the one thing that singers have that instrumentalists don't is the text. Therefore the crucial point is, surely, what the hell are they singing about? I'm using the word story in the wide sense, not necessarily 'once upon a time'." - Artistic director of the National Chamber Choir Paul Hillier

"I would have been mortally embarrassed trying to write an Iraqi voice. I know the voices of Scottish soldiers, the mentality, I know all that. But who am I to come in and say, 'Oh, poor you. This is such a trauma we've inflicted on you. And we're going to help you by making a play about it.' No we're not. We're going to help you by getting out of the country." - Writer of Black WatchGregory Burke

"With opera, I'm like Don Giovanni with women. I would like to sing everything. And when I hear something new, I'm in love." - Tenor Roberto Alagna

"We are all novelists when we think of our own lives. Every memory is a creation. If you remember a place you were, and then come back 20 years later, you're shocked - Oh! It was like this?" - Psychoanalyst Philippe Grimbert

"I had the image of this man who's arrested, and he's in the Bridewell and he's left languishing in a cell with the toilet going 'glug, glug, glug' and all the rest of it. And then he's suddenly summoned by the taoiseach." - Gerard Humphreys on his play Our National Games, about Capt James Kelly and the arms crisis

"The thing that started me painting originally was seeing Bambi when I was about nine. I was incredibly disturbed by the forest fire that killed Bambi's mother, and that distress gave me the impulse to create something, as a way of dealing with it." - Joni Mitchell on painting

"In the end, a painting by [Philip] Guston still opens my heart, but Duchamp's urinal just tells us how clever he is, so I'll go for Guston every time." - US-based Irish artist Tim Hawkesworth on painting versus conceptual art

"When I tried to do something else, everyone behaved as if I was Gypsy Rose Lee trying to paint a Matisse." - Novelist Zoë Heller on her move from writing a regular newspaper column to writing fiction

"I would have started writing a lot earlier if I hadn't been [Arthur Miller's daughter]." - Writer and director Rebecca Miller

"If anyone were to ask me if it was too late to learn, as an adult, I'd say absolutely not. Now, you really have to work at it. - Playwright Marie Jones on learning to play the accordion

"I'm a teacher who writes. It is hard to find the time. I'm the head of a department, there is a lot of administration work, as well as preparing classes. When I come home, I can just about flop down in front of the television. It's all I'm able for." - Novelist David Park

"It took Sydney Pollack a long time to get me to do Tootsie. I asked myself if I wanted to play some frothy, ditzy character after I had just done Frances. Obviously, I'm thrilled that I did." - Jessica Lange

"It's not particularly affirmative or nice. It's remote from cosy ideas of natural harmony. Because it's mouldy and messy and prodigious, and liveliness is always mixed with decay, growth with death." - Painter Nick Miller on living in the country as a landscape painter

"It's like constantly repeating a tongue-twister, that's the level of co-ordination there has to be between the brain and the fingers. It's not just memory. It's hugely demanding in every way." - Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt on playing Bach's complete Well-Tempered Clavier in concert

"We discovered how Ireland and Korea have a lot in common culturally. In fact, if you hum the tune of both national anthems, they are almost identical!" - Co-artistic director of Dance Theatre of Ireland Robert Connor

"The public ownership of the building is not an abstract taxpayer thing, or cultural user thing. We tried to establish this monumentality through a wide, easily accessible, commonly owned area. People grasp the idea that they own the building. They've taken it out of our hands." - Architect Tarald Lundevall on the new Oslo Opera House

"Film has become such a central part of our culture now that I think sometimes too great a weight is placed upon it in terms of scrutiny and analysis. There's a lot of rather specious professorial stuff that swirls around films." - Daniel Day-Lewis

"For the first 15 years we probably rehearsed 330 days a year. Most of the rehearsals take four hours, and in the beginning we often did one in the morning and one in the evening." - Vogler String Quartet cellist Stephan Forck

"The whole rush to create new buildings is tied to our financial wealth. But the change of the physical landscape is also a change of our mental landscape, our history and how we imagine we are at this moment." - Choreographer Fearghus Ó Conchúir

"I remember one review of The Office Christmas Special that compared it unfavourably to Dickens. What? You're saying I'm not as good as the greatest storyteller ever. Boo! Boo! I think I can live with that." - Ricky Gervais

"I started to go into churches and I'd sit there watching the sanctuary light. Then, one day it just struck me that God didn't light the light, man did. That the sanctuary lamp was really just like the bonfire in the distance, the candle in the window, the faint music in the soul that welcomes us home. That the Gods are impotent in terms of human life. That all they can do is provide the venue for our reflection." - Playwright Tom Murphy

"It's not just about music. It's about everything else. It's about who we are and who we were and the 30 years in between. It's also about what your energy flow is like and what his is like." - Paul Brady on the challenge of reuniting with Andy Irvine to perform their seminal album, Andy Irvine Paul Brady

"The worst enemy of jazz, for example, is often the jazz fan. Most of them should never be let into gigs. A lot of them don't seem that fond of the music anyway and none of them can dance." - RTÉ presenter John Kelly

"I found that 80-90 per cent of all women who apply - and when you include men, around 70 per cent of all applicants - have absent fathers or never met their fathers." - Big Brother producer Philip Edgar-Jones

"Putting the agriculture into culture or the culture into agriculture." - Micheál Ó Suilleabháin on playing traditional music in Bantry House

"What is the sense of touring in Ireland if you're Pugwash? People say you have to get out there to bring up the fanbase, but I think that's a total joke, because - for what I do, which is unlike what, for example, Mundy or Paddy Casey does - you cannot badger people to come to your gigs . . . For the most part, people will not come to see me doing my Beatles-esque pop of a windy, cold, rainy night. That's a fact of life, I'm afraid." - Singer Thomas Walsh aka Pugwash

"I never doubted at all. If you ever doubt then you are in trouble. I never thought: 'I should do this or that in case I don't make it.' I never had a back-up plan." - Kevin Spacey

"Scaling back certainly doesn't have to mean dumbing down." - Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Philippe de Montebello

"I have learned to write about things that are personal without objectifying anybody or anything, and that's been an important lesson for me. It's useful not to dump on people while simultaneously expressing a truth or a feeling if it's necessary, without diluting the intensity of the lyric." - Singer Martha Wainwright

"There are so many rich people in Russia, the economy is growing, there is a stability which is not understood by everyone as a blessing. In the West they think it's boring to see Russia being so stable. We think it's great." - Principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra Valery Gergiev

"I've come to a much more controlled idea about death and loss, but I don't think it's possible to come to that much more controlled idea until you've gone through the crazy part . . . I don't mean that I'm controlled. I mean that I gave up the idea that I had control. That's the new control." - Writer Joan Didion

"You know you can be having a bad day and someone will walk by and say: 'Hey, I love you, Will.' That really cheers you up. That's a really lovely thing." - Actor Will Ferrell

"I think it's a great handicap to be discovered at an early age. I didn't have that burden of early success. I had the much more livable and durable career where success comes late, and comes slowly, and you ease into it. So by the time it comes, you're ready to deal with it." - Composer Philip Glass

"I asked Shirley [Bassey] to come in, and I said, 'Don't ask any questions, just go in front of that mike, and sing your butt off, okay?' And that's what she did." - Composer John Barry on the 1964 Goldfinger theme tune

"When Oprah Winfrey did the DNA thing it cost, like, $20,000. Now you can send a swab of saliva in a ziplock bag for €250 and they can trace it. So I'm gonna do that, and we'll see what happens." - Blues singer Dee Dee Bridgewater on her (possibly African) roots

"I've probably seen more naked people than anyone in the world." - Artist Spencer Tunick

"If what you want to do is write, then it's madness not to do it." - Novelist Joseph O'Neill

"Oh, I didn't know about that book. Is it a book of American stories that Richard Ford has put together?" - Writer and winner of Frank O'Connor International Short Story Competition Jhumpa Lahiri about her inclusion in Richard Ford's The New Granta Book of the American Short Story

"We have a much darker and reduced vision of the future now, focused on whether we are going to survive. It was absolutely not the vision we had in the sixties or the seventies. Electronic music was a mixture of innocence and ambition. - Musician Jean Michel Jarre

"One good thing about it is that I don't think I can get rattled now. I've seen how other people manage or haven't managed the art world. It gives, but it can also take away." - American painter Thomas Nozkowski on becoming an "overnight success" after 30 years

"Part of the problem with the Irish film industry has been trying to be too universal, whereas what they really needed to do was to be really Irish. I think we should try and present a view of ourselves that only we can." - Film director Declan Recks

"Ireland needs to have as much professionally produced opera of high quality as the population of this country wants and needs and can want and can need. That's a matter of providing for the citizenry, ultimately." - Opera Ireland chief executive Niall Doyle

"People used to go to cricket and watch cricket. Now they go in drag. People dressed as nuns watching test cricket! It's as if everyone feels that merely to be a spectator is to be subsidiary. You have to validate your existence by becoming part of the event." - Theatre critic Michael Billington

"I think if we're doing our job and actually engaging with the arts world, so much of it is about taking a risk, taking a punt on an artist or a show or a project. I'd like to think we can do some justice to that." - Culture Ireland chief executive Eugene Downes

"It's the most famous moustache in the world, isn't it? It gets some terrible responses. People do double takes." - Actor Tom Vaughan-Lawlor on his moustache in Arturo Ui at the Abbey

"As soon as he heard my accent, he said nobody would understand me - and he persisted in calling me Seán McManus. When I watched the DVD extras, I was absolutely mortified. Oliver Stone sub-titled me!" - Oscar-nominated cinematographer and Armagh native Seamus McGarvey

"I believe in living. I believe in the old farmer's principle of letting the field lie fallow . . . If I'm writing all the time, what am I writing about? Where's life happening?" - Luka Bloom

"I guess my height has hurt me as much as it's helped me. In comedy people don't mind casting tall women next to shorter men. It adds to the humour." - Six-foot-tall actor Allison Janney (right)

"I spend half my life on planes and trains and the other half at my kitchen table learning music." - Soprano Ailish Tynan

"As an intelligent artist, you have to be aware of the nature of the beast. They call creativity the merciless mistress of innovation. Think of Orson Welles. He was brilliant. Better than me." - Modest co-star of You Don't Mess With the ZohanRob Schneider

"Ballroom dancing is becoming popular all over Europe. In Poland every town will have five or six studios. They are like McDonald's." - Dance teacher Lia Mullins

"The world of writing is as fragile and as delicate and as finely balanced as any other life, and you can be very well settled into it, and it can let you down." - Novelist James Ryan

"It's a wonderful play: very funny and a bit mad, but also quite dark - I mean, it's about all the human emotions, particularly jealousy and revenge." - David Bolger on directing Opera Ireland's A Midsummer Night's Dream

"The problem, mostly in America, is that they just don't want to admit that teenagers have sex." - Ellen Page on playing a pregnant teenager in Juno

"Politicians think they have answers for everything. We artists, we only have questions." - Persepolis writer-director Marjane Satrapi

"I've been aware of him since I was a boy, maybe seven years old, singing in a choir. For me, there has always been Bach, he is at the heart of my tradition and at the heart of all music." - Bach biographer Christoph Wolff

"For the first time in my life I don't feel like an oddity at rehearsals. The things I talk about over a cup of tea are the same as what everyone here talks about. Usually people look at me and say, 'You've got sheep? That's bizarre'. Here, they don't think it's bizarre because they look at sheep every day of the week." - Actor Mary McEvoy on appearing in Michael Scott's community production of Dancing at the Ballroom of Romance at the Rainbow Ballroom, Glenfarne, Co Leitrim

"In Iraq it was never knowing where the bullets are going to come from and who is going to fire them. We wear a uniform, but the men we're fighting don't." - Poet Brian Turner

"For the audience as much as the actors theatre is a contract of compassion. You walk on stage, and you're giving them an invitation: asking 'Shall we?'." - Actor Derbhle Crotty

"The importance of being involved in the arts is certainly not reflected in my earnings. I suppose I should say that as an actress I find it character-building to live on a low wage." - Karen Egan

"We do use saliva. Honestly. It has particular chemical properties, and for a pre-clean on an even painting surface it brings things up beautifully. But not if you've eaten curry. Even if you've just eaten something quite bland, it takes about an hour for your saliva to revert to neutral. If you've had a curry the night before, forget it - you'll be out of action for days." - Hugh Lane Gallery's head of conservation Joanna Shepard

"Playing music is like breathing and eating and drinking: it's a need that we have, that we can't ignore" - Altan's Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh

"When you write songs, you gotta be like a receiving station: you gotta be aware of what's going on around you. I never know what a song is going to be about before I write it." - Singer-songwriter Tony Joe White

"I was dropped by my publisher after my first two books. But I always believed in myself." - Novelist John Boyne

"A lot of English traditional music is guesswork anyway, so it's very difficult for people to be vehemently opposed to experimenting with it." - Folk musician John Spiers

"After my father died, we began to live. He was psychotic. He really was terrifying." - Director Terence Davies

"I lost about 14 kilos and weighed 59 kilos by the end. It was the only way we could possibly do it and make it convincing." - Michael Fassbender (right) on portraying Bobby Sands in Hunger

"I am not a nationalist. I am not a unionist. The human element overrides all that nonsense. Before you are Irish or British, you are a human being." - Director of HungerSteve McQueen

"There are people, locally and nationally, who seem to have the best interests of their community or country at heart. But it's hard to find those people in a position of power at the moment." - Kilkenny rapper Captain Moonlight

"The margin is a really wonderful place to get a reading of a culture." - Choreographer Tere O'Connor

"At the end of the day, I can see myself doing 'Ma, I'm on top of the world' on the roof of the Gate when everybody else has left me." - Gate Theatre director Michael Colgan

"I got the most terrible reviews, but it didn't affect me at all. When you get stupid people saying stupid things about you, there's no point in worrying about it." - Artist Patrick Scott