All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.
Colm ToibinI think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen.
Colm ToibinWriter's block! It doesn't exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.
Colm ToibinI went to live in Barcelona in 1975, when I was twenty. Even before I went there, I knew more about the Spanish Civil War than I did about the Irish Civil War. I liked Barcelona, and then I grew to like a place in the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pillars, especially an area between the village of Flavors and the high mountains around it.
Colm Toibin