Quote

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

Colum McCann

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Irish
Tunes
Happy
Great

More quotes by Colum McCann

Image
Long ago, long ago. The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.
Colum McCann
Image
If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
Colum McCann
Image
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
Image
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.
Colum McCann
Image
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
Colum McCann
Image
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
Image
Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.
Colum McCann
Image
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
Image
I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.
Colum McCann
Image
This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
Colum McCann
Image
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
Image
One of those out-of-the-ordinary days that made sense of the slew of ordinary days. New York had a way of doing that. Every now and then the city shook its soul out. It assailed you with an image, or a day, or a crime, or a terror, or a beauty so difficult to wrap your mind around that you had to shake your head in disbelief.
Colum McCann
Image
It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful.
Colum McCann
Image
Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
Colum McCann
Image
The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small.
Colum McCann
Image
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.
Colum McCann
Image
The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
Colum McCann
Image
With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
Colum McCann
Image
I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book
Colum McCann
Image
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Colum McCann