List of Colum McCann Quotes

I'm Of The Opinion That The Real Is Imagined And The Imagined Is Quite Real. The Real Is Imagined, In The Sense That We Shape Our Stories, So Anything That Even Happens On The News Gets Shaped In A Certain Way And Gets A Texture, And That The Imagined Can Be Real.

There Are Fewer And Fewer Jews In Ireland, But We Still Have One Of The Most Famous Jewish Characters In Literary History, Of Course, In Leopold Bloom.

Women Get The Short Shrift In History. It's Been Largely Written And Dictated By Men, Or At Least Men Believe That We Own It, And Women Have Really Been In Those Quieter Moments At The Edge Of History. But, Really, They're The Ones Who Are Turning The Cogs And The Wheels And Allowing Things Like The Peace Process To Happen.

I'm Not So Sure That I Can Teach People How To, You Know, Write Dialogue Or Create Plot Or Anything Like That. But If I Can Get Them And Grab Them By The Scruff Of The Neck And Say, You Can Do This, And If I See That Fire In Their Eyes, That's When I Think I Know A Writer.

I Want The Younger Writer To Know That She Or He Is Meaningful, That What They Have To Say Is Powerful In This World. But They Can't Come Indoors, They Can't Close The Curtains, They Can't, Like, Lock Themselves Away From The World And Say Nothing.

Ultimately, You Can Only Ever Write What You Know. It's Logically And Philosophically Impossible To Write What You Don't Know.

Personally, I Like The Social Novel. I Like Writing That Gets In And Under The Hood And Looks About - At What's Going On. But I Don't Say To Any Writer That That's Absolutely What They Should Do.

It Had Never Occurred To Me Before But Everything In New York Is Built Upon Another Thing, Nothing Is Entirely By Itself, Each Thing As Strange As The Last, And Connected.

...it Was Necessary To Love Silence, But Before You Could Love Silence You Had To Have Noise.

He Didn't Like It All That Much When He First Came - All The Rubbish And The Rush - But It Was Growing On Him, It Wasn't Half Bad. Coming To The City Was Like Entering A Tunnel, He Said, And Finding To Your Surprise That The Light At The End Didn't Matter; Sometimes In Fact The Tunnel Made The Light Tolerable.

He Said To Me Once That Most Of The Time People Use The Word Love As Just Another Way To Show Off They're Hungry. The Way He Said It Went Something Like: Glorify Their Appetites.

I Think One Of The Biggest Political Failures, And The Biggest Social Failures, Over The Past Few Years Has Been The Failure Of Empathy; Not Being Able To Look At The Other Person Down The Street.