Colm Toibin Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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When I was 11, I realised that I did not have to live the life my mother had: school, marriage, children, apartment, summer house.
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It's great when a director like Cameron Crowe can take what you do and fit it into what he's doing. If someone's a fan of you already, they can take what you do and make it work for what they're doing. You don't know their vision, and you're thinking, 'How is this guy going to take what I do and make it work in this movie?'
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Everyone should be commended for allowing people to make disasters, to make failures - you've just got to be sure that it's a magnificent failure and that, by creating a magnificent failure, you plant the seed.
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I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.
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If there's anything worse than being 16, it's having parents visibly reliving their own teenage years in your anguished presence.
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I've been very active all my life. I was a combat instructor in the Israeli Army.
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Tragedy is like strong acid - it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.
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I did not love reading, spelling, math and science. I struggled. I was a terrible speller.
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I always loved advertising. If I hadn't been in fashion, I'd have been in advertising.
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Television offered me the opportunity to do new things; I had written a lot of scripts other than scary movies. I had actually written some romantic comedies and stuff that I really wanted to try my hand at, and nobody would let me do that. Television allowed me to do anything I wanted.
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Vilification on the grounds of race or religion is always wrong. There's no place for inciting hatred within our Australia society.
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In Hollywood they're getting younger, but believe me, it's not the food. It's the plastic surgery.
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I consider science fiction and fantasy my genre. And I've noticed over the years that there doesn't tend to be a lot of lighthearted, comedic stuff.
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There are a lot of dynamics and a lot of politics that go into records and getting played on the radio.
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When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect toward others.
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Don't try to be like somebody else. You'll be miserable. You need to be yourself, and don't ever get a big head.
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I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was... appalling... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.
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I'm very grateful to God for what he gives me. Victories, remarkable victories, but you have to go through the defeats. That is why I praise God for everything.
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The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.
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Spike optioned my first book, 'Now the Hell Will Start,' and he trusted me to write the screenplay, too. That was an awesome learning experience - I grew up watching Spike's movies, and here he was giving me handwritten notes about structure and dialogue. His feedback taught me so much about how to craft a cinematic narrative.
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I feel that people who haven't read my books and haven't heard me lecture - who don't in fact know what my work is about - have been very hard on me. There is an expression in Alcoholics Anonymous called "contempt prior to investigation." I feel many people practice contempt prior to investigation.
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I accomplished what I set out to do, but I lost my discipline and my career.
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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.
