Colm Quotes & Sayings

Finally, she let herself feel how much she had lost, how much she would miss. — Colm Toibin

And, in return, when I get sick, you can come out and look after me when the others get fed up of me. That's what we are all for. — Colm Toibin

In the past I've worked with directors who saw very much their scene in their head and knew exactly how they were going to cut it. — Colm Meaney

Normally when I'm sent a script I'll read it through to see how it hangs as a story and then I'll go back and read it through again and look at the character. — Colm Meaney

I've played all kinds of historical characters, but they are stuck in movies that aren't their movies. — Colm Feore

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

None of them could help her. She had lost all of them. They would not find out about this; she would not put it into a letter. And because of this she understood that they would never know her now. Maybe, she thought, they had never known her, any of them, because if they had, then they would have had to realize what this would be like for her. — Colm Toibin

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

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 Toibin

She has gone back to Brooklyn,' her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more. — Colm Toibin

If words decorate the home of Being, then hands, and by extension art, are the sketch of Being. — Colm Gillis

The difference between the detailed plans he drew up and the house itself when finished, so filled with raked sea light, is the difference between the body and the soul, between musical notation and a song, between the idea for a drawing and the actual drawing itself. — Colm Txf3ibxedn

I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become? — Colm Toibin

I went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it. — Colm Toibin

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. And yes, I suppose I was interested in that story in the gap between memory itself, the real business of being alive, and the imagination. — Colm Toibin

She explained to him that she had been homesick, and that Father Flood had inscribed her on the course as a way of making her busy, and how studying in the evening made her feel happy, or as happy as she had been since she had left home. — Colm Toibin

I've worked on all sorts of things, like the sci-fi stuff for Vin Diesel, where the script is numbered and is in unphotocopy-able colours and your name is stamped into every page. And it doesn't really help because it creates a false sense of specialness about the thing. — Colm Feore

For a while she was quietly resigned to the prospect that nothing would change, but she did not know what the consequences would be, or what form they would take. — Colm Toibin

From now on the architects would take over as the high preists of this bourgeois city. — Colm Toibin

It was like the arrival of night when you knew that you would never see anything in daylight again. — Colm Toibin

As they sat at the table, she did not like the girls talking among themselves, or discussing matters she knew nothing about, and she did not encourage any mention of boyfriends. She was mainly interested in clothes and shoes, and where they could be bought and at what price and at what time of the year. Changing fashions and new trends were her daily topic, although she herself, as she often pointed out, was too old for some of the new colours and styles. Yet, Eilis saw, she dressed impeccably and noticed every item each of her lodgers was wearing. She also loved discussing skin care and different types of skin and problems. Mrs. Kehoe had her hair done once a week, on a Saturday, using the same hairdresser each time, spending several hours with her so that her hair would be perfect for the rest of the week. — Colm Toibin

The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens. — Colm Toibin

She would learn how to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live. — Colm Toibin

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed. — Colm Toibin

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

A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy. — Colm Meaney

more she thought about it the more she came — Colm Toibin

I think the whole business of people emigrating was that no one ever told them, although everyone knew, especially if it was to the United States, that it was forever, and the party before you left was called an 'American wake,' in the sense that they knew you wouldn't come back. — Colm Toibin

I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors. — Colm Meaney

The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their mustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished. — Colm Toibin

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

Dreams belong to each of us alone, just as pain does. — Colm Toibin

He had grown fat on solitude, he thought, and had learned to expect nothing from the day but at best a dull contentment. Sometimes the dullness came to the fore with a strange and insistent ache which he would entertain briefly, but learn to keep at bay. Mostly, however, it was the contentment he entertained; the slow ease and the silence could, once night had fallen, fill him with a happiness that nothing, no society nor the company of any individual, no glamour or glitter, could equal. — Colm Toibin

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 Toibin

On one of the nights during my journey I wandered out under the sky which was lit with stars and I believed for a moment that soon these stars would cease to glitter, that the nights of the future would be dark beyond dark, that the world itself would undergo a great change, and then I quickly came to see that the change would happen only to me and to the few who knew me; it would be only we who would look at the sky at night in the future and see the darkness before we saw the glitter. We would see the glittering stars as false and mocking, or as bewildered themselves by the night as we were , as leftover things confined to their place, their shining nothing more than a sort of pleading. — Colm Toibin

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present. — Colm Toibin

I don't come out of an oral tradition, I come out of silence. — Colm Toibin

The idea that what had happened could be erased, that the burden that was on her now could be lifted, that the past could be restored and could make its way effortlessly into a painless present. — Colm Toibin

Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep - it can't be done abruptly. — Colm Toibin

'One Minus One' and 'Barcelona, 1975' are more or less autobiographical. — Colm Toibin

The rest of the time he entertained all the guilt that wished to call, carried in by the wind through the darkness, to enter his spirit ... — Colm Toibin

If you don't make mistakes, they'll notice you and they'll get to like you,' she added. Eilis — Colm Toibin

I do go back to Ireland, and I'll probably be doing a film in Ireland in January, and I guess that kind of keeps me classified as 'the Irish actor,' but the last four or five projects that I've been in are either American or English, so I don't feel terribly trapped in that. But sometimes, yeah, you would like to not be called 'the Irish actor.' You'd prefer to just be called 'the actor.' — Colm Meaney

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 Toibin

I usually read a script from an audience perspective first, and then look more closely at the character only. — Colm Meaney

When a book comes from the publisher and you see it for the first time ... Of course it's not remotely like seeing a baby for the first time, but I can remember with each book what room I was in when I opened it. That would be excitement, though, I think. Not pride. — Colm Toibin

Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions. — Colm Toibin

And then you'll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who's only yours. And you'll realize ... that this is where your life is. — Colm Toibin

I'm pragmatic. If this is going to make sense, get me a job, and in the end let me put my kids through school. I'll play killers. But my kids always ask me, 'Do you die in this one, too, Daddy?' — Colm Feore

Talking about the show reminds you of things that you went through. So it's fun. When the show was on, I couldn't have handled it. I didn't want that direct connection. — Colm Meaney

It occurred to her that he had thought more closely about her over the previous few years than she had about him. She wondered if that could be true. She knew that how she felt affected him, and now, for the first time, how he felt seemed more urgent, more worthy of attention than any of her feelings. All she could do was to let him know and make him believe that she would do everything she promised to do. — Colm Toibin

Carefully, she went back up the stairs and found that if she moved along the first landing she would be able to see him from above. Somehow, she thought, if she could look at him, take him in clearly when he was not trying to amuse her or impress her, something would come to her, some knowledge, or some ability to make a decision. — Colm Toibin

Colm sighed...
-She's quite beautiful. Like a fairy and a goddess all wrapped into one.
-How very... poetic of you.
...
He felt a sharp tug in the vicinity of his heart.
-And most accurate
He added

Colm & Graham — Donna Kauffman

Which is good, in a way, because the danger in doing something like STAR TREK is that you end up in that pigeonhole and you're doing that the rest of your life. — Colm Meaney

So this was what being alone was like, she thought. ... It was this wandering in a sea of people with the anchor lifted, and all of it oddly pointless and confusing. — Colm Toibin

I said that when I looked at photographs of the firefighters who went into the Twin Towers, their faces looked to me like Irish faces. I hadn't yet learnt how careful outsiders have to be when talking about race in America, and I'd put my foot in it. Someone stood up and said aggressively, 'What do you mean by Irish faces?' — Colm Toibin

Even in the depths of dreadful situations, there's usually something rather comic, or something you can laugh about afterwards, at least. So, I do look for the comedy in those things. — Colm Meaney

As an actor, I like to get a bit of momentum going with a character and kind of work a bit quicker. I mean, not crazy-fast, but, you know, five or six pages a day is a nice pace. — Colm Meaney

Ome 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. — Colm Toibin

Even in drama, I like to try to find the humor because I think it's very human. Even in the depths of dreadful situations, there's usually something rather comic, or something you can laugh about afterwards, at least. — Colm Meaney

Greta Wickham. He used to say if only Nora and Greta were here now, we wouldn't be in this mess, even when there was no mess at all." "Oh, he talked very warmly about you," Peggy interjected, "and William Junior and Thomas had nothing but good words to say about Maurice Webster when he was teaching them. I remember one day Thomas had a temperature and we all wanted him to stay in bed and he wouldn't, oh no he wouldn't, because he had a double commerce class with Mr. Webster that he could not miss. You know they wanted Thomas to stay in Dublin when he qualified. Oh, he got offers with very good prospects! We told him he should consider — Colm Toibin

I feel just fine about ignoring or bypassing the rights of people I have known and loved to be rendered faithfully, or to be left in peace, and out of novels. — Colm Toibin

It's interesting because I haven't done a lot of period work in the past, but I always wanted to because I'm interested in history. — Colm Meaney

I do not care much about the mysteries of the universe, unless they come to me in words, or in music maybe, or in a set of colours, and then I entertain them merely for their beauty and only briefly. — Colm Toibin

What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling. * — Colm Toibin

I usually look at things like that from an audience perspective first, then have a closer look at the specific character they're talking about me for. — Colm Meaney

There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you're trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society. — Colm Keaveney

Eilis replied to say that it was not just Mrs Kehoe, who was not in any way extravagant, it was everyone in America, they all kept their heating on all night. As — Colm Toibin

I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room. — Colm Toibin

New people arrive and they could be Jewish or Irish or Polish or even coloured. Our old customers are moving out to Long Island and we can't follow them, so we need new customers every week. We treat everyone the same. We welcome every single person who comes into this store — Colm Toibin

Colm was a good sleeper. But if there was one sound at night that should wake him, and any sensible man who loved his family, it was the barking of dogs.
The noise was coming from the village. It was not just one or two dogs, but surely every mangy cur and mongrel that lived there. Something was abroad, and in this time of the dying of the year, when fell creatures roamed the countryside as hunger began to bite, it was not likely to be anything good. — Duncan Harper

The details of what I told him were with me all the years in the same way as my hands or my arms were with me. — Colm Toibin

But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would ne be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone it own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency. — Colm Toibin

If you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it. — Colm Toibin

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. — Colm Toibin

People love talking about writers as storytellers, but I hate being called that: it suggests I got it from my grandmother or something, when my writing really comes out of silence. If a storyteller came up to me, I'd run away. — Colm Toibin

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. — Colm Toibin

Eilis was fascinated by [ ... ] his sweet duplicity in giving no sign of what had happened before. She was almost glad to know that he had secrets and had ways of calmly keeping them. — Colm Toibin

When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up. — Colm Toibin

in this waking time his presence, once so solid, lacked any substance or form; it was merely a shadow at the edge of every moment of the day and night. — Colm Toibin

Jesper Llewellyn Fahey, that is enough!" Colm roared. (...)
Inej cocked her head to one side. "Jesper Llewellyn Fahey?"
"Shut up," said Jesper. "It's a family name."
Inej made a solemn bow. "Whatever you say, Llewellyn. — Leigh Bardugo

I remember too much; I am like the air on a calm day as it holds itself still, letting nothing escape. — Colm Toibin

Describe character using dialogue. Describe character using what the characters see or do or think, but not what they had done or where they had been. — Colm Toibin

And I told Father Flood that since I would already be getting my reward in heaven, I have that nicely arranged, thank you, he owes me a favour that I would like repaid on this earth. — Colm Toibin

I'm slightly influenced by sport in that I like the idea of trying, like an athlete, to keep absolutely ready. That's an emotional thing, almost. I don't mean physically, although I play tennis. But you try to keep yourself ready. — Colm Toibin

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

I like it that they [disciples] feed me and pay for my clothes and protect me. And in return I will do for them what I can, but no more than that. Just as I cannot breathe the breath of another or help the heart of someone else to beat or their bones not to weaken or their flesh not to shrivel, I cannot say more than I can say. And I know how deeply this disturbs them, and it would make me smile, this earnest need for foolish anecdote or sharp simple patterns in the story of what happened to us all, except that I have forgotten how to smile. — Colm Toibin

Discipline and unconditional support is earned by understanding and trust and inclusion. Not by isolation, not by nasty tricks. — Colm Keaveney

I suppose I look for humor in most situations because it humanizes things; it makes a character much more three-dimensional if there's some kind of humor. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud type of stuff, just a sense that there is a humorous edge to things. I do like that. — Colm Meaney

I do like working on independent films where it is a smaller budget and less pressure. The pace is also quicker than that of a big budget film. You are shooting at a fairly fast pace. Sitting around for three or four days can be quite draining. So I guess in terms of film or television, I would say filming an independent feature. — Colm Meaney

I played trombone for 10 minutes, and then I was in an accordion band in school for even less. — Colm Meaney

So, we get into the first piece. Then, layer, layer, layer, do all of this. Then we jump into the trousers. Then I'm zip-tied in to this bottom piece and glued into the feet. So you can't get out. There is a zipper ... somewhere. But it'll cost you money to find out where. And to actually make it functional, it's pretty ridiculous. So, I plan ahead. — Colm Feore

Between the time I was 16 until I was about 20, the books I read were by people like Thomas Mann, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop. All gay, of course, although I swear I didn't know that at the time. Yet all of them, it turned out, had had a parent who died during their childhood. Sexuality is nothing compared to that. — Colm Toibin

I find it hard to see how my northern cousins could get so worked up about counties created by British imperialists. — Colm O'Rourke

The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize. — Colm Toibin

I do dead Canadians. If he's dead and he's Canadian and he's famous, I'll be playing him at some point. — Colm Feore

In the two-room flat where I live in Japan, I try to take time every day to step away from the bombardment of e-mails and opportunities and papers around my desk, for an hour, and just sit on our 30-inch terrace in the sun, reading something sustaining, whether 'The Age of Innocence' or the latest by Colm Toibin. — Pico Iyer

By day the old area of Barcelona is bustling, full of shouting, hammering, drilling and shutters being pulled up and down. You listen out for sounds.
If you want a replacement gas cylinder you wait for the sound of the delivery man hitting a cylinder with a piece of metal in the street. — Colm Toibin

John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things. — Colm Toibin

May Lacey, wisps of thin grey hair appearing from under her hat, her scarf still around her neck, sat opposite Nora in the back room and began to talk. After a while, the boys went upstairs; Conor, when Nora called him, was too shy to come down and say good night, but soon Donal came and sat in the room with them, carefully studying May Lacey, saying nothing. — Colm Toibin