Colm Tóibín quotes

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, essayist, and critic widely recognized for his powerful storytelling and exploration of identity and exile. His works, such as "Brooklyn" and "The Master," have received international acclaim and numerous literary awards. He continues to influence contemporary literature through his evocative prose and insightful observations. Here are 61 of his quotes:

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 Tóibín

It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.

Colm Tóibín

I wanted to be a poet as a child and I have a wall in my study dedicated to poetry books, all in alphabetical order, that reminds me daily of my failure.

Colm Tóibín

I have a rule that I don't drink in New York because I don't want to wake up with a hangover and not be able to work.

Colm Tóibín

When I was a professor at the University of Austin in Texas, it had such a luxurious swimming–pool that one end had a raised ledge in the water specifically so you could drag a deckchair in and lie on it and read. But the problem is that the students are all so young and the thing with Americans is that when they're fit, they are so fit. So you feel like someone's granny pottering about in the slow lane.

Colm Tóibín

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

Colm Tóibín

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

Colm Tóibín

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.

Colm Tóibín

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.

Colm Tóibín

I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Colm Tóibín

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 Tóibín

It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world.

Colm Tóibín

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 Tóibín

The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side.

Colm Tóibín

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 Tóibín

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 Tóibín

I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that's what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.

Colm Tóibín

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 Tóibín

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

Colm Tóibín

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 Tóibín

Aged 15 or 16, I found some of the priests sexually attractive, they had a way about them... a sexual allure which is a difficult thing to talk about because it's usually meant to be the opposite way round. Boys like me, aged 15 -- if one of them had... yeah, it would have been absolutely no problem for me aged 15. It didn't happen, but it wouldn't have been a problem.

Colm Tóibín

The room is like a cave, and has books I love in it. The main door was closed up and a smaller opening was made under the stairs. (I went away while all this was happening.) The furniture is locked in, and part of me is locked in too, or I hope it is, although I often made a bid to escape. I have left instructions that I would like to be buried here when I die or a bit before, the cave bricked up.

Colm Tóibín