Colm Toibin Quotes

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

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

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

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.

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.

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

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

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

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.

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

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.'

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

in skies of deepening blue the moon, heaven's queen was now afloat

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

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.

“One Minus One’”and “Barcelona, 1975” are more or less autobiographical.

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

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.

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.