Colm Toibin Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don't forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights.
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When I left university I was working for a documentary film company for six or seven years to the great relief of my father whose greatest waking fear was that I would become an actor.
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I grew up poor in India, and there were days when we struggled to find food and other basic necessities. Our mother worked odds and ends jobs to keep the family together and educate us.
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He who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.
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Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.
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I'm evangelical.
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Corona Light has had very faithful stewardship from us from the very beginning in 1989.
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Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways.
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If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
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A lot of my friends are club people. It's not me. It's funny to represent that, because it's not me. I don't fit into a gay club setting. It's just ironic that I represent that somehow.
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People lived in the same apartments for years. You'd meet a group of kids in kindergarten, and you'd still be with them in high school. No one ever left the neighborhood.
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At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.
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Why change? If you're happy, and things are going really well at one place, there is no need to change.
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That is America. That is America. Those bonds of affection; that common creed. We don't fear the future; we shape it. We embrace it, as one people, stronger together than we are on our own.
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Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?
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Welcome those big, sticky, complicated problems. In them are your most powerful opportunities.
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The slavery of Negroes in the South was not usually a deliberately cruel and oppressive system. It did not mean systematic starvation or murder.
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I was a gang leader. Although, it was a gang for defensive purposes. It was not a gang to sell drugs.
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When you talk with famous scholars, the best thing is to pretend that occasionally you do not quite understand them. If you understand too little, you will be despised; if you understand too much, you will be disliked; if you just fail occasionally to understand them you will suit each other very well.
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We not only romanticize the future; we have also made it into a growth industry, a parlor game and a disaster movie all at the same time.
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I know a lot of people who read and think: "George [Saunders] is so much fun." There's no denying you're fun to read, but as a writer I think of [George Saunders] as, in fact, not a fun and freewheeling type but really an obsessive control artist.
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There's a lot of bands that blow up quickly, but then they die quickly. Longevity is the healthy thing; that's the pursuit.
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'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical.
