John McGahern Quotes

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.

I’ve never written anything that hasn’t been in my mind for a long time – seven or eight years.

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.

But that private world, once it’s dramatised, doesn’t live again until it finds a reader.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church.

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.

I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.

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.

My father was very outwardly religious.

When I was in my 20s it did occur to me that there was something perverted about an attitude that thought that killing somebody was a minor offence compared to kissing somebody.

I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer.

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn’t exist without the other.

I think it’s linked to the realisation that we’re not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story.

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.

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.

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.