This much I know: Colm Tóibín

MY advice to aspiring writers is to finish everything you start.

Work.

I would like to have been a civil servant. Maybe in the Department of Education of a very enlightened and changing country, like Spain in the early 1980s, or Britain in the late 1940s, or Brazil now.

I suppose part of your destiny is written in your body, in your DNA, but I like the idea of will and luck and drift.

I work every day of the week, more or less every day of the year, and I don’t drink at all for long stretches of the year. I tend to get up early. I just work. So things get finished. I mean what else could happen?

I sometimes miss the experience of working as part of a team. Often when I am in Dublin on a Friday at five, I walk up the street where I live and see that everyone is coming out of work and many of them are going to have a drink. They all look excited.

I am often in the middle of a new chapter, and I work well at weekends, so I don’t have a bar I go to on Fridays. Or friends I meet for drinks like that. But I wanted to work for myself, and work on large and ambitious projects, and I do that, and I mustn’t complain. But I wish there was someone in the next room and the next, all doing the same work, and maybe even a boss that we could make jokes about.

I like a day when I have it all to myself from early morning until bed-time. And I work happily then, maybe taking a break to watch the six o’clock news and listening to music, or reading poetry at the end of the day. If I am in Dublin I have my lunch out somewhere on my own, and read the paper then. I think cooking and domestic activity are forms of foolishness. I don’t have a washing machine, for example, and I may have an ironing board, but I don’t think so.

The best advice I ever received was from Roy Foster. He told me that you can always work in the evening, even if you have been working in the morning and the afternoon.

I write in longhand with ink, using only the right-hand side of the page of an A4 size notebook. I make corrections on the other side. I like making the words myself, being able to touch them.

I’m not very health conscious. But I have good intentions, such as a bicycle in the shed in Wexford. I sleep well. Is that good?

If I could, I’d change the school curriculum from beginning to end. The two-tier health system. The cautious approach to change and reform. The insularity. The bad public transport. The bad buildings. The general foolishness. And I think the whole idea of passports is insane. I think people should be able to wander in and out of any place they like without being stopped by anyone.

My first memory of writing is of a few poems written aged ten or so. And then aged twelve, in Sep 1967, poems again. And then my first story, aged 14. But I didn’t write anything at all, except letters, between the ages of 20 and 24. Then I started writing fiction.

I teach one semester a year at Columbia University in New York in the English Department. I learn a lot from my work. It sharpens me and I hope the students get something from it too.

The traits I most admire in others are seriousness. And then the ability to make me laugh. Letting things that annoy you pass. Not behaving like a creep.

So far, life has been one step at a time. I would side-step a big challenge and go home and write a sentence and then maybe another. Or just sit there and read a book.

I don’t think I have learned anything. Maybe that young people are a bit more innocent than older people. Or they have more energy.

Colm Toibin will be In Conversation with Nicholas Fox Weber, Curator of The Sacred Modernist: Josef Albers as a Catholic Artist, at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork on Thursday, Jun 21. (Tickets €25) More information from www.glucksman.org