Quotes from Colum McCann

I'm much more interested in allowing a story to happen, and people find whatever meaning is in there.

I have a wardrobe full of scarves now, just about every color under the sun. My trick is that I always cut them in two, down the middle. They're lighter, thinner, skinnier that way. And because I'm cheap, I get two scarves for the price of one.

Every man with his own peculiar vice. His will hardly rock heaven or hell.

Good days, they come around the oddest corners.

The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

'Let the Great World Spin' at the end talks a lot about connections and light and possibility and the fact that the world doesn't end. Even in the darkest times, we have to go on.

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

I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.

I sit there thinking about how much courage it takes to live an ordinary life.

I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.

Sometimes, in life, nothing happens. But, sometimes, nothing happens beautifully.

When I come home, I say I'm coming home to Dublin. When I'm in Dublin, I say I'm going home to New York. I'm sort of a man of two countries.

The real beauty in life is that beauty can sometimes occur.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

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.

What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident.

Yet she likes complications. She wishes she could turn and say: I like people who unbalance me.

This is not my life. These are not my cobwebs. This is not the darkness I was designed for.

I have the most charmed, most - I feel entirely blessed and lucky that I have the life that I have.

Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first stone you throw. And in my conception of the novel, the letter becomes important. But what's more important is the fact that we need to continue to tell each other stories.

The further away we got from 9/11, the more I wanted to find some way to recover. I wanted to talk about the more anonymous corners of the city, because I think it's very important that not all of that anger was turned to revenge.

I don't believe the world's a particularly beautiful place, but I do believe in redemption.

In a certain way, novelists become unacknowledged historians, because we talk about small, tiny, little anonymous moments that won't necessarily make it into the history books.

So much of her time spent like this: dreaming up things to say and never quite saying them.