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" 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.' "
Colm Toibin
Say
You
Someone
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" I think the whole business of people emigrating was that no one ever told them, although everyone knew, especially if it was to the United States, that it was forever, and the party before you left was called an 'American wake,' in the sense that they knew you wouldn't come back. "
Colm Toibin
American
Think
Business
" 'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical. "
Colm Toibin
Autobiographical
Less
Barcelona
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Live
Village
War
" Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that. "
Colm Toibin
Time
People
Parent
" Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let's have no more back story! "
Colm Toibin
Story
Back
Dance
" I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things. "
Colm Toibin
Book
Stories
Think
" I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination. "
Colm Toibin
Words
Live
Imagination
" Everyone who's in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn't see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time. "
Colm Toibin
She
America
Home
" I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels. "
Colm Toibin
Left
Peace
People
" Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can. "
Colm Toibin
Way
Funny
Life
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Ireland
Because
More
" I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare. "
Colm Toibin
Control
Moment
Father
" My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed. "
Colm Toibin
Down
Name
Said
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Speak
You
Important
" The best thing about New York is working late into the night. At 1 in the morning on a Saturday, to be still working, there's an immense satisfaction in being enclosed by it. "
Colm Toibin
Best
New York
Night
" When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up. "
Colm Toibin
Up
Imagine
Irish
" The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize. "
Colm Toibin
Story
Feel
Trying
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Small
Life
Us
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Me
Silence
Writing
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Women
View
Three
" You have to keep writing. It's almost like practice, almost like tennis, that actually after a few days of not writing, first of all it makes you slightly depressed and uneasy, but it also affects the style when you start up again. You need to get the show on the road. "
Colm Toibin
Style
Writing
Road
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Life
Creation
Strange
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
I Am
Poetry
Mirror
" John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things. "
Colm Toibin
Same
Me
OK
" Describe character using dialogue. Describe character using what the characters see or do or think, but not what they had done or where they had been. "
Colm Toibin
Character
See
Think
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
School
Home
You
" Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country. "
Colm Toibin
Run
Country
Military
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Know
Saying
Slowly
" People's interest in glamour and clothes and nylon stockings and all those things were, when I was a little boy, the sort of world that I listened to. "
Colm Toibin
World
Glamour
Boy
" History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does. "
Colm Toibin
History
Voting
Say