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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.

Colum McCann

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Lasts
Last
Persons
Person
Firsts
First
Thinking
Thinks

More quotes by Colum McCann

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The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
Colum McCann
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Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don't have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.
Colum McCann
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There is always room for at least two truths.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small.
Colum McCann
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He might have been naive, but he didn't care he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.
Colum McCann
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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.
Colum McCann
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I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
Colum McCann
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...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
Colum McCann
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I write articles, and I do profiles of members of organizations and associations.
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 have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.
Colum McCann
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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
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It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
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.
Colum McCann
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Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get the language right.
Colum McCann
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She was tired of everyone wanting to go to heaven, nobody wanting to die. The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.
Colum McCann
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With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
Colum McCann