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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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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Novel
Longer
Simply
Juggling
Language
Novels
Difficult
Require
Stories
Closer
Right
Perfection
Short
More quotes by Colum McCann
There are no days more full than those we go back to.
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Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years
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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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Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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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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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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One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
Colum McCann
I’m not interested in blind optimism, but I’m very interested in optimism that is hard-won, that takes on darkness and then says, ‘This is not enough.’ But it takes time, more time than we can sometimes imagine, to get there. And sometimes we don’t.
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Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Colum McCann
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.
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A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.
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He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
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Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
Colum McCann
We have to admire the world for not ending on us.
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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCann
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
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.
Colum McCann
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
Colum McCann
Women get the short shrift in history. It's been largely written and dictated by men, or at least men believe that we own it, and women have really been in those quieter moments at the edge of history. But, really, they're the ones who are turning the cogs and the wheels and allowing things like the peace process to happen.
Colum McCann
This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
Colum McCann