All John McGahern Quotes
When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.
John McGahern
58% of people like this quote
I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story.
John McGahern
57% of people like this quote
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
John McGahern
56% of people like this quote
I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.
John McGahern
55% of people like this quote
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.
John McGahern
55% of people like this quote
We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places.
John McGahern
54% of people like this quote
The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.
John McGahern
54% of people like this quote
Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space.
John McGahern
54% of people like this quote
Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church.
John McGahern
53% of people like this quote
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the poor. The Church was my first book and I would think it is still my most important book.
John McGahern
53% of people like this quote
I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.
John McGahern
53% of people like this quote
Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.
John McGahern
51% of people like this quote
Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners.
John McGahern
50% of people like this quote
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
John McGahern
50% of people like this quote
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