327 Quotes by Colum McCann

Pain's nothing. Pain's what you give, not what you get.

I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!

The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

I don't know of a greater privilege than being allowed to tell a story, or to listen to a story. They're the only thing we have that can trump life itself.

Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.

Whenever summer rolls around I begin to realize that I'm a complete and utter book snob. In relation to reading, I have absolutely no guilty pleasures at all. No graphic novels. No murder mysteries. My summer read is really no different from my winter read. I know many bookshops and magazines would have me believe that our summer forays are different, but literature is literature, and unfortunately snobbery is snobbery.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.