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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
Ultimately
Impossible
Write
Ever
Writing
Philosophically
Logically

More quotes by Colum McCann

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Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
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The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
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I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
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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 person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
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Téa Obreht is the most thrilling literary discovery in years
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Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
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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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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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I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
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This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
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Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.
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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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I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
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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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He might have been naive, but he didn't care he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.
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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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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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With all respects to heaven, I like it here.
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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