Colm Toibin Quote

The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their mustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished.

Colm Toibin

The men could be easily distinguished as fellow Americans by the quality of their mustaches and the innocent and amicable expressions on their faces; the several women could only have come from New England, making this clear, he felt, by their willingness to allow their menfolk the right to speak at length while confining their own talk to short and brisk, intelligent interruptions or slightly disagreeable remarks once the men had finished.

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About Colm Toibin

Colm Tóibín ( KUL-əm toh-BEEN, Irish: [ˈkɔl̪ˠəmˠ t̪ˠoːˈbʲiːnʲ]; born 30 May 1955) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
His first novel, The South, was published in 1990. The Blackwater Lightship was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The Master (a fictionalised version of the inner life of Henry James) was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 2006 International Dublin Literary Award, securing for Toíbín a bounty of thousands of euro as it is one of the richest literary awards in the world. Nora Webster won the Hawthornden Prize, whilst The Magician (a fictionalised version of the life of Thomas Mann) won the Folio Prize. His fellow artists elected him to Aosdána and he won the biennial "UK and Ireland Nobel" David Cohen Prize in 2021.
He succeeded Martin Amis as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester. He was Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017–2022. He is now Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University in Manhattan.