Colum McCann Quotes

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

For every Scott Fitzgerald concerned with the precise word and the selection of relevant incident, there are a hundred American writers, many well-regarded, who appear to believe that one word is just as good as another and that everything which occurs to them is worth putting down.

A good novel is a good novel, pointe finale. And I think what I'm writing is exactly that.

A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad.

The thing about good writing is it has a music to it.

I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

Poetry is a special use of language that opens onto the real. The business of the poet is truth telling, which is why in the Celtic tradition no one could be a teacher unless he or she was a poet.

I have a hard time keeping a story straight when I tell the truth because when you start lying you have to remember what you said, and I'm not very good at that.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

A novel that features real people is complicated, but in the end, that extra challenge is all for the good.

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

Prose is admittedly an art rooted in social intercourse, and a fiction writer is faster to find a common denominator with his cell mates than a poet is.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

I read a lot of scripts, and there's a lot of good writing and a lot of OK writing and a lot of crappy writing. And even with the really good writing, it doesn't necessarily speak to me.

You can't take a story and just stretch it out - that does not a novel make.