A Quote by Colum McCann

Every first thing is always a miracle. The first person you fall in love with. The first letter you receive. The first stone you throw. And in my conception of the novel, the letter becomes important. But what's more important is the fact that we need to continue to tell each other stories.
Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. Those are stories. Funny stories. Awkward stories. Stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. But that's all bad first dates are: short stories. Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime. And when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime.
I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.
It occurred to me in my junior year of high school. I got my first letter from a big college. I still have that letter to this day - a letter from Indiana.
I'll get a three-page letter and the last paragraph says 'I know you'll never read this, but here's my number.' I love to call those people because the first thing they say is, 'Governor, I didn't mean everything I said in the letter about you.'
Eliminate the clutter. That's the key. Eliminate the clutter and understand the important things. First and foremost, the most important thing is affecting the people around you in a positive way. Second thing is, be one of those guys that's going to out-study every person there is on what you need to do from a game-plan standpoint, what you need to do from a characteristic standpoint to stand apart. The last thing is, throw it to the color jersey we're wearing.
My first and last love will always be fiction. It's the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night. I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life.
The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.
The most important thing, my father told me, which I have never forgotten, and which I have often put unto practice was: If you get into a quarrel with anybody, hit him first. "If you hit first, the battle is half-won," my father always said "Don't let him hit first. You hit him first." "What's more," he never forgot to say, too "Usually one blow is all you need." I found this to be true.
Melody is the first thing that comes to me when I'm songwriting. I learned piano classically first, and then I went into soul, and so melody has always been the first. It's so important.
I'm convinced that the Christian claim is really true, that this is just a warm up to the big event. That this is just the appetizer to the feast, and if we can plug into that and understand that this part of our story is just the introduction, it is not even the first line of the first paragraph, it's just the first letter or first word. We are just getting started.
I love telling 'first' stories - first loves, first college experience, first kiss, all of those kinds of things.
When you first read a script is the purest moment. That's when you can understand how an audience will ultimately receive it. The first reading of the script is so important because you're experiencing it all for the first time, and it's then that you really know if it's going to work or not.
Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.
Just about everybody has written a first novel that they throw away before writing their actual first novel.
Love at first sight is easy to understand; it's when two people have been looking at each other for a lifetime that it becomes a miracle.
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