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
thinking ordinary ordinary-life
I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.
accumulation incidents shelves
What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.
real ballet life-is
The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.
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.
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.
loneliness odds world
Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.
cannot trade
You cannot read any image of the World Trade Center without thinking of 9/11.
home man sort
When I come home, I say I'm coming home to Dublin. When I'm in Dublin, I say I'm going home to New York. I'm sort of a man of two countries.
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.