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
past thinking skins
Sometimes we just walk into something that is not for us at all. We pretend it is. We think we can shrug it off like a coat, but it's not a coat at all, it's more like another skin. [...] All I wanted was to make my life thrilling for a while: to take the oridinary objects of my days and make a different argument out of them, no obligations to my past.
silence noise silence-love
...it was necessary to love silence, but before you could love silence you had to have noise.
cities everyday littles
The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.
kissing years matter
I guess this is what marriage is, or was, or could be. You drop the mask. You allow the fatigue in. You lean across and kiss the years because they're the things that matter.
fighting love-is thinking
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.
loneliness odds world
Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.
good-day corners
Good days, they come around the oddest corners.
honesty
I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
book taken mean
I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book
memories land impossible
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
real things-in-life stories
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
important illusion possibility
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
cities knows
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.
might wells ifs
Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.