Colm Toibin Quotes
-
I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world. Because the world is a place of silence, the sky at night when the birds have gone is a vast silent place. Words will make the slightest difference to the sky at night. They will not brighten it or make it less strange. And the day too has its own deep indifference to anything that is said.
→ -
Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.
→ -
The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.
→ -
John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.
→ -
You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.
→ -
Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.
→ -
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
→ -
Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.
→ -
I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.
→ -
I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn't know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.
→ -
I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.
→ -
Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.
→ -
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
→ -
She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.
→ -
It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.
→ -
I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.
→ -
Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you're writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, 'Your time is up.'
→ -
The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.
→ -
Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage.
→ -
All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.
→ -
It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.
→ -
“One Minus One’”and “Barcelona, 1975” are more or less autobiographical.
→ -
I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.
→ -
I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.
→ -
in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat
→ -
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.
→ -
Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.
→ -
I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
→ -
I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
→ -
I've never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it's not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.
→
Related Authors
-
Nick Hornby Novelist -
Saoirse Ronan Actress -
Jeanette Winterson Writer -
Andrew O'Hagan Novelist -
Fiona Shaw Actress -
Edna O'Brien Novelist -
Elizabeth Bishop Poet -
Ruth Ozeki Novelist -
Peter Carey Novelist -
NoViolet Bulawayo Author -
Domhnall Gleeson Actor -
Rachel Kushner Writer -
William Trevor Novelist -
Jim Crace Writer -
John Banville Novelist -
Colum McCann Writer -
Henry James Writer -
Ian Mcewan Novelist -
Jhumpa Lahiri Author -
Eleanor Catton Author