Top 33 Colm Toibin Quotes

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert’s and Beethoven’s chamber music and Sibelius’ symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.

John McGovern taught me that it’s OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

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.

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me – it’s not as if it’s a pleasure.

Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here.

In my 20s, as I began to travel in Europe, I found comfort in religious paintings. Even though my own belief in Catholic dogma had been shaken and weakened, I found that the beauty and the richness of the art still held me.

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

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.’

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.

The novel space is a pure space. I’m nobody once I go into that room. I’m not gay, I’m not bald, I’m not Irish. I’m not anybody. I’m nobody. I’m the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It’s to get that person to feel what I’m trying to dramatize.

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

You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you’ve made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who’s been sent away to boarding school can understand that.

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: ‘If she writes anything else, do let us know.’ Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

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.

I don’t think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?

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.

I think that was one of the things that happened, especially in Ireland, that you left in order to improve yourself, and you couldn’t write home and tell people, ‘Look, I’m really lonely,’ because you’d realize how much those letters were going to matter, that you needed to put good news or uplifting news into them.

I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.

I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.

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

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.

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.

I’ve never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it’s not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.

Describe character using dialogue. Describe character using what the characters see or do or think, but not what they had done or where they had been.

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.

I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.