Quote

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

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

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
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
Image
Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
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
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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
He said to me once that most of the time people use the word love as just another way to show off they're hungry. The way he said it went something like: Glorify their appetites.
Colum McCann
Image
The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
Colum McCann
Image
I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
Colum McCann
Image
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.
Colum McCann
Image
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.
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
I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.
Colum McCann
Image
...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
Colum McCann
Image
I'm only telling you on the truth, he said. If you can't stand the truth, don't ask for it.
Colum McCann
Image
Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
Colum McCann
Image
With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
Colum McCann
Image
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
Image
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive.
Colum McCann
Image
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