Colum McCann
Colum McCann
Colum McCannis an Irish writer of literary fiction. He was born in Dublin, Ireland and now lives in New York. He is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Tea Obreht, and has visited many universities and colleges all over the world...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth28 February 1965
CountryIreland
democracy stories
Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.
whatever-you-say
Whatever you say, say nothing.
steps ordinary moments
How inevitable it is; we step into an ordinary moment and never come out again.
pain forever tea
She was forever tilted sideways by the notion that pain was inevitable, chance was cruel, and all human ingenuity should go towards the making of a good cup of tea.
life people wish
Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.
cities everyday littles
The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. It had its own nuances. It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.
heart care might
He might have been naive, but he didn't care; he said he's rather die with his heart on his sleeve than end up another cynic.
loneliness trying world
No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.
pain giving
Pain is not wat you get, it is wat you give.
character rude pages
I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.
years use dozen
About 25 years ago, I took a bicycle across the United States. I soon found out that the greatest item of clothing was the trusty bandanna. There were dozens of uses for a bandanna - as a pot holder, a chain cleaner, a sun shield, a headband, a snot rag, a declaration of Kerouacian intent.
jobs emotional years
The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
fiction alive wonderful
Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.
character thinking play
Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.