Colm Toibin Quotes & Sayings (Page 5)

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 did think of becoming a priest quite late on, when other boys were thinking of knocking over fences and going out with girls. I would have made a very good bishop: nice housekeeper, nice clothes - god, the clothes.”