Colm Toibin Quotes

Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.

There's a saying in the movie industry that if your movie is about what you actually think it's about, you're in big trouble. I think it's the same with books.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate.

I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

I'm a strange kind of author - I like assignments. I wasn't clever enough to invent an iconic figure like Salander, but she's my kind of girl.

This is the story, this is your character, I have the sense of the landscape, I have the sense of the scene, I have all that stuff. But I'm also looking for something else to happen, an accident or something. You're focused on the story you intend to tell and then you have to have a peripheral net out to catch these accidents.

Both 'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' and my first novel, 'This One is Mine,' are pretty complex on a story level, and fun reads as a result.

What can I say: I'm a writer - I enjoy forcing pain and suffering on my characters!

Novelists have always had complete freedom to pretty much tell their story any way they saw fit. And that's what I'm trying to do.

If you're writing an opinion piece, it's your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions.

A novel wouldn't be a book if there weren't some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.

These days we're all hyper-aware of the canonical way in which stories are supposed to play out - people are taught all about three-act scripting and where to put the reversal and all of that - and I think we can do more interesting narratives.

So long as you tell a story that falls within the fairly generous boundaries of the suspense novel, you're free to make the novel as good as you can. You're allowed to challenge the reader. You can experiment with voice and style.

The thing about the 'Melrose' novels is that I have to feel they're impossible when I set out.

What's great about well-written material is, if you can shock with justifiable actions, that's the best.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

What's great about 'Game of Thrones' is they change the perspective, the POV, all the time. So you will have one story told by one character and you'll go, 'Oh my God, horrible', and then maybe the season after you have the same story told but from the person you thought was just the most horrible, vile creature.

With any story I write, I could actually write it from three or four different perspectives, which would end with a completely different moral at the end.

It has always been something I could do, and it may seem odd that in my case I seem to create an interesting narrative and frustrate the reader's opportunities to follow it at every step.

I want the reader to feel something is astonishing. Not the 'what happens,' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me.

Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

When I went to university in Colorado, I was encouraged to write very innovative, experimental things, and some of the short stories in 'Bearded Ladies' are a little bit experimental.