I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

- Colm Toibin

While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always li…

- Colm Toibin

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

- Colm Toibin

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

- Colm Toibin

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

- Colm Toibin

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

- Colm Toibin

Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.

- Colm Toibin

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 …

- 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