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
hatred borders strikes
...and it strikes her, as she walks, that borders, like hatred, are exaggerated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.
accumulation incidents shelves
What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.
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.
might wells ifs
Even if you're going to die, you might as well die pretty.
cities knows
It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.
fighting love-is thinking
Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you're lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who've been around awhile know it's just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it's never even there in the first place.
anonymous certain history novelists talk
In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.
clarity experience remind stories time
I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.
deepest imagine large man trying understand
It's interesting if you can talk about the large moments and also the small moments to understand the deepest complexities of a man by trying to imagine who they are.
boil inside mistake novel
The short story is an imploding universe. It has all the boil of energy inside it. A novel has shrapnel going all over the place. You can have a mistake in a novel. A short story has to be perfect.
directly lacks people ripping seldom stories
Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in fiction is dangerous. It also lacks imagination.