Colum McCann Quotes

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

I came up with a story and I wrote it.

I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

When I started writing and illustrating, I knew little of classic children's literature. My stories came from real life, from my concerns about what was happening in the world.

I don't write anything that I haven't lived. In terms of integrity, you have to write what you live. And if you write beyond what you live, it is theory. And theory is not helpful. It is just not.

When I was a teenager, I got into SF, quite heavily, and that too has had a major impact on my writing.

The first time I saw J.K. Rowling, I was sitting across from her at the 'Fantastic Beasts' table read, and I was just amazed by how wonderful she is in person.

The short answer to 'Why do you write' is - I suppose I write for some of the same reasons I read: to live a double life; to go places I haven't been; to examine life on earth; to come to know people in ways, and at depths, that are otherwise impossible; to be surprised.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

You can't write a good song about a whorehouse unless you've been in one.

Writer advice... Write. Finish things. Go for walks. Read a lot & outside your comfort zone. Stay interested. Daydream. Write.

A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.

This fact was something I also learned from this first novel that I needed personal experience to invent, to fantasize, to create fiction, but at the same time I needed some distance, some perspective on this experience in order to feel free enough to manipulate it and to transform it into fiction. If the experience is very close, I feel inhibited. I have never been able to write fiction about something that has happened to me recently. If the closeness of the real reality, of living reality, is to have a persuasive effect on my imagination, I need a distance, a distance in time and in space.

I think it's important to leave spaces in a story for readers to fill in from their own experience.

A lot of my writing is not terribly civilized. Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don't see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that. That's why I write the way I do.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

Everything of mine is permeated with my love of ideas-both big and small. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as it grabs me and holds me, facinates me. And then I'll run out and something about it... I write for fun.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

There's a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it's well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

I write about what I know and what I have experienced. This keeps me an "honest" writer.