Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Very seldom in my fiction have I directly used the stories people have told me. I think ripping off people's lives in… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
If you have a structure beforehand, you're sort of stuffing your story into a pre-assembled box. You don't want that to happen.… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us,… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I think it is our job, as writers, to be epic. Epic and tiny at the same time. If you're going to… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I'm of the opinion that the real is imagined and the imagined is quite real. The real is imagined, in the sense… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I love short stories. They're like small imploding universes. They are very tightly bound and controlled. I'd been wanting to write one… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“For a moment I felt a vicious hatred for him and his quiet ways, his mundane stroll through the summer, his ordinariness,… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Things in life have no real beginning, though our stories about them always do. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them.… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Give life long enough and it will solve all your problems, including the one of being alive. — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it's the last we'll ever have and we record… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“The short sharp shock of three thousand mother two hundred mothers. The ones who picked through the supermarket debris for pieces of their dead… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I'm not so sure that I can teach people how to, you know, write dialogue or create plot or anything like that. But if… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“How long ago it was and how strange, but all dead friends come to life again sometimes.” — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity.” — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
Novels are more difficult simply because they are longer and require more juggling, but short stories are closer to perfection, if you can get… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
I think one of the biggest political failures, and the biggest social failures, over the past few years has been the failure of empathy;… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“Bits of it floating in the air, he said. "It's like dust. You walk about and don't see it, don't notice it, but it's… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
“He has read whole volumes on the philosophy of nonviolence. How peace had to be understood in all its moral dimensions. The proper coexistence… — Colum McCann Copy Share Image
