Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCannis an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in New York. He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht, and has visited many universities and colleges all over the world...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth28 February 1965
CountryIreland
heart simple long-ago
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.
believe men wheels
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.
thinking firsts lasts
The person we know at first, she thinks, is not the one we know at last.
pain people endurance
She likes the people with the endurance to tolerate the drudge, the ones who know that pain is a requirement, not a curse.
writing knows
I write about what I know; and I write about things that are new to me, and that I didn't know before.
real news stories
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.
beautiful love-is alive
The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.
optimism darkness sometimes
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.
inspirational world chaos
The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.
fact great talks
'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on.
believe fiction good hold poet properly truth writer
I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.
dad involved journalism local matches reports time twelve written wrote
I'd been involved in journalism for a long time - my dad's a journalist, he's written many books, and when I was twelve years old I wrote reports on local football matches for the newspapers.
color cut full price trick wardrobe
I have a wardrobe full of scarves now, just about every color under the sun. My trick is that I always cut them in two, down the middle. They're lighter, thinner, skinnier that way. And because I'm cheap, I get two scarves for the price of one.
allowing interested people
I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.