Quotes from 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?'

You have to keep writing. It's almost like practice, almost like tennis, that actually after a few days of not writing, first of all it makes you slightly depressed and uneasy, but it also affects the style when you start up again. You need to get the show on the road.

I still have a stammer that I can control by not opening a sentence with a hard consonant, or by concentrating for a moment, breathing softly down. Growing up, the 'Our Father' was lovely, made for me, the 'Hail Mary' was gorgeous, and 'Glory Be to the Father' was an absolute nightmare.

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.

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

I think that was one of the things that happened, especially in Ireland, that you left in order to improve yourself, and you couldn't write home and tell people, 'Look, I'm really lonely,' because you'd realize how much those letters were going to matter, that you needed to put good news or uplifting news into them.

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.

People's interest in glamour and clothes and nylon stockings and all those things were, when I was a little boy, the sort of world that I listened to.

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.

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

I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.

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.

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.