Colm Tóibín quotes

A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country. (Colm Tóibín)
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I have a rule that I don't drink in New York because I don't want to wake up with a hangover and not be able to work. View quote
Colm Tóibín
When I was a professor at the University of Austin in Texas, it had such a luxurious swimming–pool that one end had a raised ledge in the water specifically so you could drag a deckchair in and lie on it and read. But the problem is that the students are all so young and the thing with Americans is that when they're fit, they are so fit. So you feel like someone's granny pottering about in the slow lane. View quote
Colm Tóibín
All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much. View quote
Colm Tóibín
Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write. View quote
Colm Tóibín
While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point. (Colm Tóibín)
I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. View quote
Colm Tóibín
The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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.' View quote
Colm Tóibín
Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present. (Colm Tóibín)
I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things. View quote
Colm Tóibín
In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile. View quote
Colm Tóibín
Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them... a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round. Boys like me, aged 15 -- if one of them had... yeah, it would have been absolutely no problem for me aged 15. It didn't happen, but it wouldn't have been a problem. View quote
Colm Tóibín
The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. (I went away while all this was happening.) The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope it is, although I often made a bid to escape. I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up. View quote
Colm Tóibín