“Mankind,” Henry found himself saying, “is a very large business.” — Colm Tóibín Business Copy Share Image
'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical. — Colm Toibin Autobiographical Copy Share Image
“The rest of the time he entertained all the guilt that wished to call, carried in by the wind through the darkness,… — Colm Tóibín Darkness Copy Share Image
The best thing about New York is working late into the night. At 1 in the morning on a Saturday, to be… — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
“It was my companion, my strange friend who woke me in the night and again in the morning and who stayed close… — Colm Tóibín Companion Copy Share Image
“In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have… — Colm Tóibín Copy Share Image
I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point. — Colm Toibin Idea Copy Share Image
I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things. — Colm Toibin Book Copy Share Image
“She wondered if she was alone in having nothing between the dullness of her own days and the sheer brilliance of this… — Colm Tóibín Copy Share Image
Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly,… — Colm Toibin Age Copy Share Image
“For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and… — Colm Tóibín Deep sadness Copy Share Image
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic… — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old… — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
“...she still stopped when her mind moved towards real fear or dread or, worse, towards the thought that she was going to… — Colm Tóibín Fear Copy Share Image
I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the… — Colm Toibin Barcelona Copy Share Image
“He stopped going to his own bed, waiting instead until Leander was ready for bed and then going to the room with… — Colm Tóibín Night Copy Share Image
When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the… — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
“I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what… — Colm Tóibín Fiction Copy Share Image
“You have asked two questions, and I will answer them separately,” Gray said. “Trollope writes with precision and feeling about love and… — Colm Tóibín Love Copy Share Image
I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that… — Colm Toibin Bird Copy Share Image
“We live in a strange time,’ Electra said. ‘A time when the gods are fading. Some of us still see them but… — Colm Tóibín Copy Share Image
“You know that you are the only person who shakes his head in exasperation when I insist on making jokes and small… — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
“Henry wondered, too, what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have dealt with a… — Colm Tóibín Copy Share Image
“There was a time, I know, when I felt rage and I felt sorrow. But now I have lost what leads up… — Colm Tóibín Grief Copy Share Image
“He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull… — Colm Tóibín Contentment Copy Share Image
“The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my… — Colm Tóibín Authors Copy Share Image
“In the morning, she was not sure that she had slept as much as lived a set of vivid dreams, letting them… — Colm Tóibín Dreams Copy Share Image
“It was like the arrival of night when you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again.” — Colm Tóibín Daylight Copy Share Image
People's interest in glamour and clothes and nylon stockings and all those things were, when I was a little boy, the sort… — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
Writer's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace. — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
“if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world,… — Colm Tóibín Evocative Copy Share Image
“I’m hungry.” “We’re all hungry. But, darling, you don’t need to look hungry. Pretend you are full.” “And” — Colm Tóibín Food Copy Share Image
Describe character using dialogue. Describe character using what the characters see or do or think, but not what they had done or… — Colm Toibin Copy Share Image
It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book. — Colm Toibin Book Copy Share Image
It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they're on the other side of the world. — Colm Toibin Books Copy Share Image
I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination. — Colm Toibin Creativity Copy Share Image
Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle… — Colm Toibin Age Copy Share Image
