Top 30 Colm Tóibín Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.”

— Colm Tóibín

2. “Anyone who works in the arts knows, if you’re writing a novel or a play or anything, you have to be ready for someone to say, ‘Your time is up.’”

— Colm Tóibín

3. “I wrote every day between the ages of 12 and 20 when I stopped because I went to Barcelona, where life was too exciting to write.”

— Colm Tóibín

4. “I suppose one should have an integrated personality, but I’ve never really seen the point.”

— Colm Tóibín

5. “I first went to Barcelona in 1975 after university, and I stayed for three years. I learnt Catalan because that’s what everyone speaks in the mountains. They speak English to foreigners, but what people say to each other is much more important than what they say to you.”

— Colm Tóibín

6. “As I settled down to sleep in that new bed in the dark city, I saw that it was too late now, too late for everything. I would not be given a second chance. In the hours when I woke, I have to tell you that this struck me almost with relief.”

— Colm Tóibín

7. “The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.”

— Colm Tóibín

8. “Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.”

— Colm Tóibín

9. “I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.”

— Colm Tóibín

10. “It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.”

— Colm Tóibín

11. “The old Victorian laws against homosexuality were still on the statute books until the early 1990s. As a gay man living in Ireland, I and people like me found it easy to feel less than citizens.”

— Colm Tóibín

12. “I did think of becoming a priest quite late on, when other boys were thinking of knocking over fences and going out with girls. I would have made a very good bishop: nice housekeeper, nice clothes – god, the clothes.”

— Colm Tóibín

13. “Life has a funny way of becoming ordinary as soon as it can.”

— Colm Tóibín

14. “I was first in Sydney in 1993, and have been a few times since then. For someone who didn’t know Australia, it came as a shock how intelligent, interesting and funny the people were. If I lived there I might see it differently, but as a visitor it was a lot of fun.”

— Colm Tóibín

15. “You create a world away from home and make new rooms for yourself. But when you arrive back home in your old rooms, the world you’ve made for yourself ceases to be real. Everything seems to crumble. Anyone who’s been sent away to boarding school can understand that.”

— Colm Tóibín

16. “Writer’s block! It doesn’t exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.”

— Colm Tóibín

17. “Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me – it’s not as if it’s a pleasure.”

— Colm Tóibín

18. “It really matters to writers to find and treasure readers, all the more when they’re on the other side of the world.”

— Colm Tóibín

19. “I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.”

— Colm Tóibín

20. “I’ve never put Northern Ireland into a novel because it’s not my territory. I come from the South, so my imaginative territory is very much the Republic of Ireland rather than the North. Even though, if I wrote a novel about the North, it might sell more.”

— Colm Tóibín

21. “The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.”

— Colm Tóibín

22. “I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don’t have a strong visual imagination.”

— Colm Tóibín

23. “I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.”

— Colm Tóibín

24. “She was lonely without Blunt, but she was lonelier at the idea that the world went on as though she had not loved him.”

— Colm Tóibín

25. “While historians may go on attempting grand, sweeping and defining narratives, they work in a time when readers know that another narrative always lies in wait, and that the more intelligent an historian is, the more tentative and self-scrutinizing the tone.”

— Colm Tóibín

26. “I work very deliberately, with a plan. But sometimes I come to a point that I planned as the end and it needs softening. Ending a novel is almost like putting a child to sleep – it can’t be done abruptly.”

— Colm Tóibín

27. “It is important to find a publisher and equally important not to be noticed until your third or fourth book.”

— Colm Tóibín

28. “I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult, and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway, and I would disapprove of it.”

— Colm Tóibín

29. “If you have to read to cheer yourself up, read biographies of writers who went insane.”

— Colm Tóibín

30. “Between the ages of 8 and 12 it was difficult to know what my father was saying, and he moved very slowly, and then he died.”

— Colm Tóibín

31. “Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.”

— Colm Tóibín

32. “As his widow, she knew who she was and what she had inherited. She had loved him in her way and sometimes missed him. She knew what words like “loved” and “missed” meant when she thought of her husband. When she thought of Blunt, on the other hand, she was unsure what anything meant except the sonnets she had written about their love affair.”

— Colm Tóibín

33. “John McGovern taught me that it’s OK to write repeatedly about the same things.”

— Colm Tóibín

34. “I think you can get a sort of intensity and an edginess offering nine stories in a book. Competing versions of things.”

— Colm Tóibín