Quote

I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to be a fiction writer, why not take on something that means something. In doing this, you must understand that within that epic structure it is the tiny story that is possibly more important.

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
Mean
Within
Important
Story
Epic
Going
Understand
Possibly
Something
Means
Tiny
Time
Jobs
Structure
Think
Stories
Writers
Thinking
Take
Writer
Must
Fiction

More quotes by Colum McCann

Image
The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth.
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
I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.
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
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.
Colum McCann
Image
This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.
Colum McCann
Image
I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if I can get them and grab them by the scruff of the neck and say, you can do this, and if I see that fire in their eyes, that's when I think I know a writer.
Colum McCann
Image
If they ask you to stand still, you should dance.
Colum McCann
Image
Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.
Colum McCann
Image
There is always room for at least two truths.
Colum McCann
Image
Words are good for saying what things are, but sometimes they don't function for what things aren't.
Colum McCann
Image
I'm a complete and utter fiction. Then again, we all are.
Colum McCann
Image
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told.
Colum McCann
Image
Sometimes thinking back on things is a mistake arising out of pride, but I guess you live inside a moment for years, move with it and feel it grow, and it sends out roots until it touches everything in sight.
Colum McCann
Image
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
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
Image
He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.
Colum McCann
Image
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
Image
She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.
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