Colm Toibin Quotes & Sayings (Page 4)

“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.”

“In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.”

“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!”

“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.'”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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