Colm O'connell Quotes

#1. 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 Toibin

#2. I played trombone for 10 minutes, and then I was in an accordion band in school for even less.

Colm Meaney

#3. I don't think we have a right to enjoy our neuroses; in fact, I believe that we have a duty not to. But we cannot walk away from ourselves. Who else is there to become?

Colm Toibin

#4. My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed.

Colm Toibin

#5. That was not even ten years ago, it might have been six or seven years ago, and if anyone had told her that she would be standing here now listening to this song and all the things that had happened between then and now, she would not have believed them.

Colm Toibin

#6. Normally when I'm sent a script I'll read it through to see how it hangs as a story and then I'll go back and read it through again and look at the character.

Colm Meaney

#7. Once more she noted the hectoring tone, as though she were a child, unable to make proper decisions.

Colm Toibin

#8. You never know what way life goes. Some of it makes no sense at all.

Colm Toibin

#9. The boy became a man and left home and became a dying figure on a cross. I want to be able to imagine that what happened to him will not come, it will see us and decide - not now, not them. And we will be left in peace to grow old.

Colm Toibin

#10. My old manager of the Irish National Theatre said 'Don't worry about being a star, just worry about being a working actor. Just keep working.' I think that's really good advice.

Colm Meaney

#11. I kind of have an interest in all history. And I suspect it comes from being Irish - we like stories, we like telling stories, which makes a lot of us lean towards being writers or actors or directors.

Colm Meaney

#12. I do probably 80 or 90 per cent of the cooking at home.

Colm Meaney

#13. There are so many burning issues to be dealt with that it's completely understandable and natural that a character is struggling with these issues themselves. In that struggle, you inform the audience. The thing about this writing is that it's very easy to learn. Good writing always is.

Colm Meaney

#14. There is little or no point being chair of the Labour Party and being ignored when engaging with Labour ministers when you're trying to articulate something that affects ordinary people in society.

Colm Keaveney

#15. From now on the architects would take over as the high preists of this bourgeois city.

Colm Toibin

#16. When my friends were besotted with Jason Donovan, my heroes were Colm O'Rourke and Barney Rock

John B. Keane

#17. I find it hard to see how my northern cousins could get so worked up about counties created by British imperialists.

Colm O'Rourke

#18. In every person there is the capacity to do something really special.

Colm O'Rourke

#19. You should keep a photograph of Mick Lyons on the mantlepiece to keep children away from the fire

Colm O'Rourke

#20. Life is but a day and expresses mainly a single note.

Colm Toibin

#21. I live in words. I like looking at things, but I don't have a strong visual imagination.

Colm Toibin

#22. I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.

Colm Toibin

#23. I remember too much; I am like the air on a calm day as it holds itself still, letting nothing escape.

Colm Toibin

#24. Time and patience would bring a snail to America,' he repeated.

Colm Toibin

#25. Colin Morgan gives a stunning performance in Parked; he plays Merlin in the BBC TV show and he says the two characters are like night and day. Watch him. He's got everything it takes to be top notch.

Colm Meaney

#26. If you're playing the a historical character that's in the public consciousness, then obviously you've got to make an effort to look like that person and there's a huge amount of historical record there that you have to kind of comply to.

Colm Meaney

#27. What is hard to understand is that our dreams matter

Colm Toibin

#28. We don't want anybody to come off half-cocked and make a decision about what we're only in the middle of doing, right? So if there's shots of me out there, then somebody's going to say, "Oh, that's not the right way. That's not this and that." It has to be seen in context.

Colm Feore

#29. John McGovern taught me that it's OK to write repeatedly about the same things.

Colm Toibin

#30. In the meantime, when I wake in the night, I want more. I want what happened not to have happened, to have taken another course.

Colm Toibin

#31. A good comedy's very hard to make, so good comic writing I really enjoy.

Colm Meaney

#32. Solitude is good in the evening. Dublin is a quiet city when you get to a certain age, when your friends settle down and have kids. Nothing much happens here.

Colm Toibin

#33. History is a way of interpreting, rather than, say, knowing, the past. It is usually a set of disputes between those who have access to the same sources. It depends on ideology as much as voting in an election does.

Colm Toibin

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

Colm Toibin

#35. When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.

Colm Toibin

#36. Memory and regret can mingle, how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.

Colm Toibin

#37. 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 Toibin

#38. 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 Toibin