100+ Colm Toibin Quotes | InspiringQuotes.us

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

source: - "Colm Tóibín, novelist - portrait of the artist". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2013.

Topics: Running, Country, Military

quote writing tends to be very deliberate a novelist could probably run a military campaign colm toibin Quotes

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

Topics: Writing, Manipulation, Realizing

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Topics: Writing, Firsts, Fountain, Fountain Pens

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

source: - "Exclusive Interview: Colm Toibin Talks About His New Story Collection". Interview with Anis Shivani, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 20, 2011.

Topics: Song, Writing, Mirrors

I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.

Topics: Notebook, Writing, Long, Processors, Fountain Pens

I did think of becoming a priest quite late on, when other boys were thinking of knocking over fences and going out with girls. I would have made a very good bishop: nice housekeeper, nice clothes - god, the clothes.

Topics: Girl, Nice, Boys, Nice Clothes, Housekeepers

I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.

Topics: Years, People, Important

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

Topics: Song, Morning, Writing, Chamber Music, Chamber

I said that when I looked at photographs of the firefighters who went into the Twin Towers, their faces looked to me like Irish faces. I hadn't yet learnt how careful outsiders have to be when talking about race in America, and I'd put my foot in it. Someone stood up and said aggressively, 'What do you mean by Irish faces?'

Topics: Mean, Race, Talking, Race In America, Twin Towers

I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn't know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.

Topics: Fun, Intelligent, Australia, Sydney

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

Topics: War, Mountain, Twenties, Spanish Civil War

I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

Topics: Republic, Might, Territory

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

Topics: Country, Reading, Past

The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side.

Topics: Notebook, Writing, Hands, Paragraph, Fountain Pens

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.

Topics: Smart, Real, Reading, Claudia, Rereading

Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.

Topics: Block, Ideas, Long

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

Topics: Men, Views, Numbers

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

source: - "Colm Tóibín, novelist - portrait of the artist". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2013.

Topics: Strong, Writing, Suffering, Serious Work

Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you're writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, 'Your time is up.'

Topics: Art, Writing, Play

I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult, and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway, and I would disapprove of it.

Topics: Determination, Writing, Mean

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

Topics: Father, Age, Difficult

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

Topics: Strong, Imagination, Visuals

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.

Topics: Personality, Should, Integrated

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

source: - Interview with Anis Shivani, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 20, 2011.

Topics: Thinking, Play, Fiction, Messiness

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

Topics: Book, Thinking, Offering, Edginess

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

source: - "You can take the man out of Ireland". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. April 25, 2009.

Topics: Writing, Age, Barcelona

'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical.

Topics: Barcelona, Minus

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

source: - "This Week in Fiction: Colm Tóibín" by Deborah Treisman, www.newyorker.com. February 24, 2013.

Topics: Ordinary, Way, Becoming

John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

Topics: Writing, Taught

It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.

Topics: World, Treasure, Matter

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

Topics: Book, Important, Thirds

The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.

Topics: Book, Gay, Men

I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.

source: - Colm Toibin (2014). “The Testament of Mary: A Novel”, p.67, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Night, Sky, Differences

I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sharp simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile.

Topics: Heart, Simple, Clothes, Make Me Smile

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

source: - Colm Toibin (2012). “The Empty Family: Stories”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

Topics: Lonely, Ideas, World

As I settled down to sleep in that new bed in the dark city, I saw that it was too late now, too late for everything. I would not be given a second chance. In the hours when I woke, I have to tell you that this struck me almost with relief.

Topics: Sleep, Dark, Second Chance, Dark City, Given A Second Chance

..Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine.

source: - "The Empty Family: Stories". Book by Colm Toibin, October 1, 2010.

Topics: Pain, Regret, Attachment, Hollowness

in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat

Topics: Queens, Moon, Blue

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

source: - "You can take the man out of Ireland". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. April 25, 2009.

Topics: Real, Home, School, Away From Home

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

source: - "History students will no longer tolerate or believe grand narratives" by Colm Toibin, www.theguardian.com. August 10, 2013.

Topics: Lying, Intelligent, Self

When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.

Topics: Baby, Book, Pride

The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.

Topics: Religious, Parent, Catholic, Roman Catholic, Religious Dogma

I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.

source: - "Colm Tóibín, novelist - portrait of the artist". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2013.

Topics: Children, Sleep, Needs

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

source: - "Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)" by Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

Topics: Cheer, Insane, Biographies

“One Minus One’”and “Barcelona, 1975” are more or less autobiographical.

source: - "Exclusive Interview: Colm Toibin Talks About His New Story Collection". Interview with Anis Shivani, www.huffingtonpost.com. January 20, 2011.

Topics: Minus