Colum McCann Quotes

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

We are surrounded by story.

You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, 'Is it true?' and if the answer matters, you've got your answer . . . Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.

As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true.

There is no absolute beginning to any story, after all. There is only the moment you begin watching.

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and they had to make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

Time is a wonderful storyteller.

Literature, whether handed down by word or mouth or in print, gives us a second handle on reality.

I seem to know all the cliches, but not how to put them together in a believable way. Or else these stories are terrible and grandiose precisely because all the cliches intertwine in an unrealistic way and you can't disentangle them. But when you actually live a cliche, it feels brand new, and you are unashamed.

Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.

Nothing terrible has ever happened except in our thinking. Reality is always good, even in situations that seem like nightmares. The story we tell is the only nightmare that we have lived.

There's always a story. It's all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything's got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.

It's easy now, now that it's a story. When you were going through it, it was life. Always much harder to get the plot line on.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

So you want another story?" Uhh... no. We would like to know what really happened." Doesn't the telling of something always become a story?" Uhh... perhaps in English. In Japanese a story would have an element of invention in it. We don't want any invention. We want the 'straight facts,' as you say in English." Isn't telling about something--using words, English or Japanese--already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

The present rearranges the past. We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

But stories somehow lengthen when begun.

For example, you now look at pictures from 1968, they are hugely misleading in terms of standing in as an absolute image of the time. Because maybe two percent of the people looked the way that we now associate with that time. I was also aware that what I was aiming for is an idealized, utopian version of how people could be together. I found photography to be a very powerful tool because as long as it looks real, it is perceived as real.

Write whatever way you like. Fiction is made of words on a page; reality is made of something else. It doesn't matter how "real" your story is, or how "made up": what matters is its necessity.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all is sour if seen as experience.

The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.