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
being-ignored want way
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldnt.
mother writing son
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.
blessed lucky feels
I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.
mother brother wind
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.
past thinking years
I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.
order achieve difficulty
Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.
memories looks clean
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
heart essence needs
The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart's deep need for instruction.
giving-up luxury vanity
The luxury of age was the giving up of vanity.
two rooms
There is always room for at least two truths.
cynicism easy optimist
Cynicism is easy. An optimist is a braver cynic.
accumulation incidents shelves
What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.
art recovery joy
Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy.
real ballet life-is
The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.