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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
Ideas
Certainly
Dynamic
Play
Groups
Increasingly
Going
Strange
Solitary
Think
Happen
Musicians
Thinking
Idea
Manners
Happens
Group
Character
Musician
Conductor
Together
Characters
Introduced

More quotes by 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.
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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 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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I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.
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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.
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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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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCann
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Whatever you say, say nothing.
Colum McCann
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I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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One small cloud, cast out by the herd, limps away to the west.
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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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
Colum McCann
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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
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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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There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface. There is, I think, a fear of love. There is a fear of love.
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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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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It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.
Colum McCann
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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann