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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.

Colm Toibin

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Colm Toibin
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: May 30
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Short Story Writer
Teacher
Writer
Inis Córthaidh
Colm Toibin
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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.
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in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat
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It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.
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“One Minus One’”and “Barcelona, 1975” are more or less autobiographical.
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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.
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If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.
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John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.
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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.
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I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?'
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