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
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.
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.
real things-in-life stories
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do.
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.
class safe middle
I grew up sort of middle class, safe and suburban.
summer believe book
Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.
important illusion possibility
Where happiness was not a possibility, the illusion of it was always more important.
privilege stories trump
I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.
honesty
I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.
good-day corners
Good days, they come around the oddest corners.
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.