A GOOD novelist should always be reminded of something artistic. George Moore, when he and I were crossing the railway viaduct at Donabate, was reminded by the sunset of Nathaniel Hone, the landscape painter who lived near by. He said, `I would give ten pounds to see how that sunset will imitate Hone.' I tried to save him five by pulling the communication cord, because the fine is only five pounds if you pull it wantonly. I knew that you could never explain to a railway guard that art is more important than an accident. He must have had artistic sympathies, though, because he `forgot' the incident for ten shillings! Instead of being grateful to me . . . Moore expostulated and told me that I was impossible. I bore that in silence. I could have retorted that he was a plagiarist, for years ago Oscar Wilde had said that Nature was always trying to imitate Art. Do not look for gratitude in novelists.

— Oliver St. John Gogarty. It Isn't This Time of Year at All (1954), p. 151.

— W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), Introduction, p. xv.

Brian Aherne: On one occasion in New York, in a bar on Third Avenue, there were five or six of us sitting in a booth, and Gogarty was telling many of his wonderful stories. We were about to move off but he said, `Now I want to tell you this.' So he proceeded to tell another story, and when he was about to come to the point, a young man sitting by the bar went over and placed a coin in a jukebox. All hell broke loose. The expression on Gogarty's face changed; he became very sad, a combination of sadness and anger, and he said,

`Oh dear God in Heaven, that I should find myself thousands of miles from home, an old man at the mercy of every retarded son of a bitch who has a nickel to drop in that bloody illuminated coal scuttle.'

— Irish Literary Portraits, p. 164.