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" Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here. "
Colm Toibin
Age
You
Solitude
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" I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. "
Colm Toibin
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" 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
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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
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Business
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Violence
Book
Cruelty
" I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point. "
Colm Toibin
Point
Never
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" 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
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Child
Work
Sleep
" 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 Toibin
Thinking
History
Past
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Strong
Me
Writing
" I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second. "
Colm Toibin
Write
Pen
Fountain
" I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become? "
Colm Toibin
I Believe
Think
Walk
" 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
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View
Three
" 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 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. "
Colm Toibin
Determination
Narcissism
Think
" 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 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?' "
Colm Toibin
You
America
Race
" 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
" All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much. "
Colm Toibin
Realize
You
Manipulation
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
People
Early
Man
" 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
" The next time I write a play - in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I'll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that - that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop. "
Colm Toibin
Moments
Good
Distance
" 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. "
Colm Toibin
Work
Pen
I Am
" It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world. "
Colm Toibin
Matters
More
Treasure
" 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
" Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can. "
Colm Toibin
Way
Funny
Life
" 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
" I think that was one of the things that happened, especially in Ireland, that you left in order to improve yourself, and you couldn't write home and tell people, 'Look, I'm really lonely,' because you'd realize how much those letters were going to matter, that you needed to put good news or uplifting news into them. "
Colm Toibin
Good
Home
Yourself
" The only routine I have is that I finish everything I start. I wake up early every day - about 6.30 A.M. - but I do not work every day. I could laze for a day or two, but I wouldn't do it for three. "
Colm Toibin
Work
Wake Up
Three
" 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
" 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