Colm Toibin Quotes

Granted, I'm someone who loves words. I've always loved poetry - so it's suited to me.

From the time I was ten, I thought of myself as 'good with words,' thanks to a perceptive and supportive fifth grade teacher.

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

The poet is a specialist in something which everyone practises. Herein, poetry differs from the other arts. Everyone does not practise music or painting or even dancing, but everyone without exception puts together words poetically every day of his life.

But those two plays left me on fresh terms with language. I didn't always have to speak in my own voice.

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.

I spent many years of my life as an economist and demographer. I was finally distracted by writing my novels and poetry. I'm enormously happy that was the case. I feel that with writing I have found my metier.

Like, even when I speak, I think I speak the same way I write. I kind of see it a certain way, and it leads me to write it exactly how I'm seeing it.

The only time I felt I was different was when one of my friends said, 'I hate reading' and I stared at her like, 'What kind of an alien creature are you?!' Because it was so incomprehensible to me that someone could dislike reading! That really started my desire to help other children love reading and writing.

When I was a little boy, I was reading Dante and I was saying to myself 'Bravo, Dante, Bravo.' It's so beautiful, the music, the sound, the meaning. I felt like calling him by phone, like a friend.

If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

I always wrote. I wrote from when I was 12. That was therapeutic for me in those days. I wrote things to get them out of feeling them, and onto paper. So writing in a way saved me, kept me company. I did the traditional thing with falling in love with words, reading books and underlining lines I liked and words I didn't know.

I am definitely a storyteller, but probably not a traditional Storyteller.

Since I've been writing about things my entire life, I thought, 'Well, that's what I would do as a president is to read and then write and talk about things that are interesting to me.'

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

I always credited my mother with inspiring me to be a writer because she was such a passionate reader. She read poetry to me as a child. But rather late in life, I've come to appreciate my father, the accountant. He was a solid, organized, get-the-job-done kind of person-and you need that piece of it to be a writer, too.

I always like to think on a problem before reading about it.

I always got good grades in creative writing from elementary school on up.

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

I really admire Nick Hornby - for example, the way that he can make ordinary stuff so beautiful!

My mother was always fascinated with the fact that I could rhyme so much stuff.

In third or fourth grade, I loved to sign stories and monologues.

I've learnt over the years to always be thinking of titles and ideas that I try to put across with just a couple of words. It's the difficult part when you're writing things that are basically abstract.