Words matter. These are the best Colum McCann Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The further away we got from 9/11, the more I wanted to find some way to recover. I wanted to talk about the more anonymous corners of the city, because I think it’s very important that not all of that anger was turned to revenge.
Part of me really wants to believe that hope is entirely available to all of us. We don’t have to embrace it. It would be sentimental and silly to say that we all need it, but it is absolutely available to all of us.
I have a wardrobe full of scarves now, just about every color under the sun. My trick is that I always cut them in two, down the middle. They’re lighter, thinner, skinnier that way. And because I’m cheap, I get two scarves for the price of one.
I don’t believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don’t think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It’s all about the good word, properly inserted.
The contemporary American novelist benefits in a way from being ignored. It makes you angrier and makes you want to go into all of those places where you shouldn’t.
I’m much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.
Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first stone you throw. And in my conception of the novel, the letter becomes important. But what’s more important is the fact that we need to continue to tell each other stories.
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.
I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy; not being able to look at the other person down the street.
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.
I don’t believe the world’s a particularly beautiful place, but I do believe in redemption.
If you’re a writer, you know there are ways in which we don’t know what we’re doing at all. We’re working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you’re dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.
I don’t really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don’t know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It’s all about language, it’s all about how you apply it to the page.
The best writers attempt to become alternative historians.
I mean, every novel’s a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don’t want your novels to be mannered.
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.
It’s not very fashionable, but I love life, and I believe that things disappear and reappear and nothing ever solidifies, no matter how middle-class, housebroken, staid, and solitary someone’s life seems to be. That, I think, is what I’m writing about.