Quote

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

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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Together
Characters
Introduced
Ideas
Certainly
Dynamic
Play
Groups
Increasingly
Going
Strange
Solitary
Think
Happen
Musicians
Thinking
Idea
Manners
Happens
Group
Character
Musician
Conductor

More quotes by Colum McCann

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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.
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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
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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.
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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.
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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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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
Colum McCann
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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.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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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.
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People think they know the mystery of living in your skin. They don't. There's no one who knows except the person who carts it around her own self.
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Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years
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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
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She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.
Colum McCann
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If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
Colum McCann
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Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Colum McCann
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She takes another long haul, lets the smoke settle in her lungs-- she has heard somewhere that cigarettes are good for grief. One long drag and you forget how to cry. The body too busy dealing with the poison.
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Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
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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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I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
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