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
good-day corners
Good days, they come around the oddest corners.
honesty
I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
book taken mean
I am of the opinion, and even more so the older I get, that it is more difficult to have hope than it is to despair. And I mean this in the sense that in order to have hope you must acknowledge the despair and then you have to get beyond it. Taken from a radio interview given on BBC Radio 4's Open Book
memories land impossible
Memory has a heavy backspin, yet it’s still impossible to land exactly where we took off.
real things-in-life stories
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
important illusion possibility
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
cities knows
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.
might wells ifs
Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.
new-york lasts strange
It had never occurred to me before but everything in New York is built upon another thing, nothing is entirely by itself, each thing as strange as the last, and connected.
children growing-up thinking
That was the sort of everyday love I had to learn to contend with: if you grow up with it, it's hard to think you'll ever match it. I used to think it was difficult for children of folks who really loved each other, hard to get out from under that skin because sometimes it's just so comfortable you don't want to have to develop your own.
thinking doubt tables
And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.
children worry secret
I told him that I loved him and that I'd always love him and I felt like a child who throws a centavo into a fountain and then she has to tell someone her most extraordinary wish even though she knows that the wish should be kept secret and that, in telling it, she is quite probably losing it. He replied that I was not to worry, that the penny could come out of the fountain again and again and again.
firsts steps lasts
He realized that he had thought only about the first step, never imagined the last.
kind moments awake
He felt for a moment uncreated. Another kind of awake.