But I will say that living in Ireland has changed the cadence and fullness of speech, since the Irish love words and use as many of them in a sentence as possible.
I would love to play a British character one day. My accent wavers between Scottish and Irish very easily, though.
I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.
There is not a single injustice in Northern Ireland that is worth the loss of a single British soldier or a single Irish citizen either.
Plays by people like Martin McDonagh and Brian Friel attract huge audiences, not because they're Irish, but because they're brilliant plays.
Gerald O'Hara: It will come to you, this love of the land. There's no gettin' away from it if you're Irish.
Violence and irrationality were so long and thoroughly cultivated among the Irish, and so perfectly ingrained into their nature, that modern civilization has as yet been unable to extract the virus.
But if republicans are to prevail, if the peace process is to be successfully concluded and Irish sovereignty and re-unification secured, then we have to set the agenda - no-one else is going to do that.
I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.
I grew up mostly with classical, big band, and a lot of Irish music - I really didn't start listening to rock and roll until I was maybe sixteen.
Hats are the epitome of Englishness, and a royal wedding is the penultimate moment for a hat designer. I'm Irish, but I am a royalist and I believe in fantasy.
I find being Irish quite a wearing thing. It takes so much work because it is a social construction. People think you are going to be this, this, and this.
I believe people ought to mate for life...like pigeons or Catholics.
All you hear Catholics turning out these days are pop versions of the old Protestant anthems.
You know, I was the class clown in Catholic school, but I never thought I would make a living out of it!
I'm really happy that I was raised Catholic because it's given me years of material.
I went to Catholic school and they basically just said don't have sex, but would never explain anything.
I was brought up a Catholic and I was quite fervent, because I was sent to a convent school.
At the political level, most Jews and most Catholics have accepted the liberal idea of religious freedom.
My dad was such a bigot. He was a horrible, self-centred person. He was really racist and he'd talk about the Jews and blacks and Catholics even.
You see, some non-Catholic friends of mine have questioned the depth of my faith because of the fact that I have a good education.
