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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
Repeated
Necessarily
Lies
Lying
History
Become
Truth

More quotes by Colum McCann

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Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.
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Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.
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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
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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.
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A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.
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If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
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Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
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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.
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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.
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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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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.
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That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.
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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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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
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.
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There are no days more full than those we go back to.
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.
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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.
Colum McCann