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I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.
Colm Toibin -
When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.
Colm Toibin
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It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.
Colm Toibin -
You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you've made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who's been sent away to boarding school can understand that.
Colm Toibin -
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.
Colm Toibin -
I think the whole business of people emigrating was that no one ever told them, although everyone knew, especially if it was to the United States, that it was forever, and the party before you left was called an 'American wake,' in the sense that they knew you wouldn't come back.
Colm Toibin -
I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?
Colm Toibin -
I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.
Colm Toibin
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I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.
Colm Toibin -
It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.
Colm Toibin -
John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.
Colm Toibin -
I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.
Colm Toibin -
I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.
Colm Toibin -
I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly.
Colm Toibin
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Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.
Colm Toibin -
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.
Colm Toibin -
All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.
Colm Toibin -
It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.
Colm Toibin -
I'm slightly influenced by sport in that I like the idea of trying, like an athlete, to keep absolutely ready. That's an emotional thing, almost. I don't mean physically, although I play tennis. But you try to keep yourself ready.
Colm Toibin -
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.
Colm Toibin
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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.
Colm Toibin -
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.
Colm Toibin -
I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
Colm Toibin -
My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.
Colm Toibin