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" 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. "

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" I'm slightly influenced by sport in that I like the idea of trying, like an athlete, to keep absolutely ready. That's an emotional thing, almost. I don't mean physically, although I play tennis. But you try to keep yourself ready. "

Colm Toibin

Athlete

Play

Trying

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" 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

" I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point. "

" 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. "

" 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

Treasure

" John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things. "

Colm Toibin

Same

" 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. "

" 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

Imagine

Irish

" I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination. "

" I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book. "

" 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. "

" Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace. "

Colm Toibin

Ideas

Peace

" I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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! "

" 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. "