112 Quotes by Colm Tóibín

If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.

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.

She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.

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

..Some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to imagine.

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.

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

I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I've never really seen the point.