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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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Colum McCann
Age: 59
Born: 1965
Born: February 28
Academic
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dublin city
Philosophically
Logically
Ultimately
Impossible
Write
Ever
Writing

More quotes by Colum McCann

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The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
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I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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.
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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.
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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 sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.
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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.
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I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
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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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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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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.
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I think the Northern Ireland accent is one of the most beautiful in the world.
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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.
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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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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.
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The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
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I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
Colum McCann