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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Colm Toibin Quotes

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

– Colm Toibin

I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels.

– Colm Toibin

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I’ve never really seen the point.

– Colm Toibin

The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.

– Colm Toibin

Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn’t know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that.

– Colm Toibin

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I’d run away.

– Colm Toibin

I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult, and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway, and I would disapprove of it.

– Colm Toibin

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

– Colm Toibin

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.

– Colm Toibin

In Ireland, novels and plays still have a strange force. The writing of fiction and the creation of theatrical images can affect life there more powerfully and stealthily than speeches, or even legislation. Imagined worlds can lodge deeply in the private sphere, dislodging much else, especially when the public sphere is fragile.

– Colm Toibin

I said that when I looked at photographs of the firefighters who went into the Twin Towers, their faces looked to me like Irish faces. I hadn’t yet learnt how careful outsiders have to be when talking about race in America, and I’d put my foot in it. Someone stood up and said aggressively, ‘What do you mean by Irish faces?’

– Colm Toibin

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

– Colm Toibin

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

– Colm Toibin

I did think of becoming a priest quite late on, when other boys were thinking of knocking over fences and going out with girls. I would have made a very good bishop: nice housekeeper, nice clothes – god, the clothes.

– Colm Toibin

I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can’t be done abruptly.

– Colm Toibin

Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.

– Colm Toibin

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.

– Colm Toibin

When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time – can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.

– Colm Toibin

When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time… Of course it’s not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride.

– Colm Toibin

I think the whole business of people emigrating was that no one ever told them, although everyone knew, especially if it was to the United States, that it was forever, and the party before you left was called an ‘American wake,’ in the sense that they knew you wouldn’t come back.

– Colm Toibin

I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don’t have a strong visual imagination.

– Colm Toibin

Everyone who’s in America spends the first few years not experiencing it. The person is frightened by the newness of the place and doesn’t see things. Her emotional universe becomes the entire universe. And then when she thinks of home, her distance in space can seem like a distance in time.

– Colm Toibin

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

– Colm Toibin

The next time I write a play – in order to get audience trust for a particular sort of tragic line, I’ll try to bring the audience a good distance before that. Part of that is allowing comic moments to occur. I had been afraid of that – that once the audience started laughing in the play, they would never stop.

– Colm Toibin

Look at Austen. In her novels, you get a dance, followed by an encounter, followed by a letter, then a period of solitude. No flashbacks and no backstory. Let’s have no more back story!

– Colm Toibin

The best thing about New York is working late into the night. At 1 in the morning on a Saturday, to be still working, there’s an immense satisfaction in being enclosed by it.

– Colm Toibin

Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you’re writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, ‘Your time is up.’

– Colm Toibin

The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.

– Colm Toibin

‘One Minus One’ and ‘Barcelona, 1975’ are more or less autobiographical.

– Colm Toibin

I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn’t know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.

– Colm Toibin

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