(1965– )
Irish-born U.S. writer and professor
Colum McCann
Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them. I stroll out there into the emptiness of the pit and ask them for music. Who knows what they’re going to give me?
“This Week in Fiction: Colum McCann,” by Deborah Treisman, The Book Bench blog, New Yorker, April 9, 2012.
Family is like water—it has a memory of what it once filled, always trying to get back to the original stream.
Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2010), 57.
My brother was light-skinned, dark-haired, blue-eyed. He was the type of child everyone smiled at. He could look at you and draw you out. People fell for him. On the street, women ruffled his hair. Workingmen punched him gently on the shoulder. He had no idea that his presence sustained people, made them happy, drew out their improbable yearnings—he just plowed along, oblivious.
Let the Great World Spin (New York: Random House, 2010), 13–14.