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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
History
Become
Truth
Repeated
Necessarily
Lies
Lying

More quotes by Colum McCann

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I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.
Colum McCann
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We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.
Colum McCann
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It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime.
Colum McCann
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She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
Colum McCann
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We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.
Colum McCann
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Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
Colum McCann
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I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.
Colum McCann
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I'm only telling you on the truth, he said. If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
Colum McCann
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They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick'll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
Colum McCann
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Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Colum McCann
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There are moments we return to, now and always. Family is like water - it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
Colum McCann
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
Colum McCann
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A lot of people think that writers are much cleverer than they actually are. No, they're not. But they're emotionally clever, and they go into a character, and they feel something that they weren't entirely aware of beforehand.
Colum McCann
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I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
Colum McCann
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With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
Colum McCann
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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
Colum McCann
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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
Colum McCann
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This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
Colum McCann