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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
Right
Perfection
Short
Novel
Longer
Simply
Juggling
Language
Novels
Difficult
Require
Stories
Closer

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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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Whatever you say, say nothing.
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She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
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Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.
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We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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I know already that I will return to this day whenever I want to. I can bid it alive. Preserve it. There is a still point where the present, the now, winds around itself, and nothing is tangled. The river is not where it begins or ends, but right in the middle point, anchored by what has happened and what is to arrive.
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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.
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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.
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Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
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The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.
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I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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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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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There are no days more full than those we go back to.
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Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
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We seldom know what we're hearing when we hear something for the first time, but one thing is certain: we hear it as we will never hear it again. We return to the moment to experience it, I suppose, but we can never really find it, only its memory, the faintest imprint of what really was, what it meant.
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Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
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