Colum McCann Quotes

What I've learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.

Obviously I wouldn't have said that three or four years ago in the midst of it. But I really believe that. It's been a marvelous and important experience.

I thought I was going nowhere. Now I can see there was a pattern.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

I felt the need to tell stories to understand myself.

Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.

I've grown up with kids watching me and as they're growing up, I'm growing up.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths.

Wisdom begins at the end.

As I've gotten older and my life is a lot more stable, I've gotten more into storytelling.

If you gave me an hour in the day between '09 and '14, I could have told you exactly where I was and what I was doing.

Everything changes with time. I am not so experienced enough to analyze what the people love in me.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

Time and reflection change the sight little by little 'till we come to understand.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

I am not a historian. I am a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past

Four years and everything was the same, except me.

The nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

I think, for me, I have to remember that I'm telling a story in some way.

I know that I have to give testimony about all the things I lived, but I need time.

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

Everyone has ways of trying to find a way to memorise our past. There's something very poetic about that.

All stories are just stories of a character changing.