Colum McCann Quotes

The idea of my life as a fairy tale is itself a fairy tale.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

What is reality, anyway? Just a collective hunch.

Movies are different from real life.

I have a lot of fantasy.

The truth is always less interesting than the fiction.

Reality is how we interpret it. Imagination and volition play a part in that interpretation. Which means that all reality is to some extent a fiction.

I don't think movies or television have any basis in reality at all. It's all just pretend. That's what's fun about it.

It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most 'familiarity' is meditated and delusive.

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.

There is no doubt whatsoever that the universe is the merest illusion.

I'm a storyteller, and I was an actor, so I have a fairly thin grip on reality to begin with.

For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

Once you get that instinct for the fictiveness, the fictionality of fiction, it kind of sets you free.

Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Larger than life is your fiction in a universe made up of one.

Tonight, I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy.

We can easily represent things as we wish them to be.

Why are you messing with the fantasy? We know about the reality. Don't ruin the fantasy, OK?

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on--a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

The difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to hime make-believe and true were exactly the same thing. This sometimes troubled them, as when they had to make-believe that they had had their dinners.

Reality is fabricated out of desire.

I'm a novelist, and idle speculation is what novelists do. How odd to spend one's life trying to pretend that non-existent people are real: though no odder, I suppose, than what government bureaucrats do, which is trying to pretend that real people are non-existent.

there is no such thing as fantasy unrelated to reality