Colum McCann Quotes

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

Each author has his or her own voice. I read each book slowly so I can see the patterns they use to spread out the garden of earthly delights.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

I am terribly interested in the paragraph: the paragraph as an object, the construction, and the possibilities of what a paragraph can do.

I've gotten very alert not just to mixed metaphor but to any writing mistake.

I ain't no author, man... my writing skills are not of 'New York Times' best-seller quality, trust and believe it ain't. My vocabulary ain't.

To write you have to be able to know how to put words together.

I try to write in plain brown blocks of American speech but occasionally set in an ancient word or a strange word just to startle the reader a little bit and to break up the monotony of the plain American cadence.

I believe so deeply in the primacy of language, in lifting your prose to the highest level you're capable of and making your words symphonic.

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with.

A lot of aspiring writers are all ready to write a novel, but they don't know how to write sentences.

Ultimately, it's about the quality of the writing whatever style you are writing.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.

If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.

I have not written a perfect sentence, in the literary sense. It's a lot easier to throw a perfect pass than to write a perfect sentence, if that sentence is meant to perform more than a mechanical function.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

I am not a grammarian. Maybe my style is eccentric.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

The newspaper is, in fact, very bad for one's prose style. That's why I gravitated towards feature stories where you get a little more leeway in the writing style.

It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.

Respect the language in which you write. Be kind, develop good vocabulary, and be creative in writing beautiful sentences. Your prose should be your poetry when you write.