Colm Tóibín quotes - page 2

I went to a friend who's a girl and asked her, 'What's it like to have sex for the first time, if you're Irish – so you're modest, and it's the 1950s – so you've never seen it in a film?' I listened carefully to what she said, and I put it in the book. It was an important element, the detail was richly memorable for the person, it had to be in the book. (Colm Tóibín)
I was the worst barman who ever lived. My pints of Guinness were unholy. View quote
Colm Tóibín
If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I was brought up in a house where there was a great deal of silence. View quote
Colm Tóibín
People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination. View quote
Colm Tóibín
Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can't be done abruptly. View quote
Colm Tóibín
If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane. (Colm Tóibín)
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him. View quote
Colm Tóibín
John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I did think of becoming a priest quite late on, when other boys were thinking of knocking over fences and going out with girls. I would have made a very good bishop: nice housekeeper, nice clothes - god, the clothes. View quote
Colm Tóibín
Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I said that when I looked at photographs of the firefighters who went into the Twin Towers, their faces looked to me like Irish faces. I hadn't yet learnt how careful outsiders have to be when talking about race in America, and I'd put my foot in it. Someone stood up and said aggressively, 'What do you mean by Irish faces?' View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
"One Minus One'”and "Barcelona, 1975” are more or less autobiographical. (Colm Tóibín)
As I settled down to sleep in that new bed in the dark city, I saw that it was too late now, too late for everything. I would not be given a second chance. In the hours when I woke, I have to tell you that this struck me almost with relief. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
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. View quote
Colm Tóibín
I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland. View quote
Colm Tóibín