Top 47 John McGahern Quotes
#1. 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
#2. People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get unsure.
John McGahern
#3. When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence. In the new dispensation all that was good in what went before is tarred indiscriminately with the bad.
John McGahern
#4. It [love] was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance.
John McGahern
#5. Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.
John McGahern
#6. I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.
John McGahern
#7. 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.
John McGahern
#8. Across her face there seemed to pass many feelings and reflections: it was as if she ached to touch and gather in and make whole those scattered years of change. But how can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh.
John McGahern
#9. 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
#10. But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.
John McGahern
#11. He best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.
John McGahern
#12. I mean I think that's a fact and I think that we had a very peculiar type of Catholic Church here in that it was a fortress Church.
John McGahern
#14. 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
#15. I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.
John McGahern
#16. Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood
John McGahern
#17. I suppose ... in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was ... it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.
John McGahern
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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.
John McGahern
#21. 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
#22. ... But all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying.
John McGahern
#23. About this time, whether he felt there wasn't sufficient drama in his life or that he was determined not to be outdone by Miss McCabe, he decided that he was dying.
John McGahern
#24. 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.
John McGahern
#26. The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.
John McGahern
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
John McGahern
#30. If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral.
John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.
John McGahern
#31. His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives
especially those he disliked
about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails.
John McGahern
#32. I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
John McGahern
#34. Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it's no more than a gift on loan.
John McGahern
#35. Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church.
John McGahern
#36. 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
#37. My favorite optimist was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window washers heard him say, 'So Far, so good.'
John McGahern
#38. To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like shedding stiff, formal clothes or kicking off pinching shoes.
John McGahern
#39. For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970.
John McGahern
#40. 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.
John McGahern
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. As looking down from great heights brings the urge to fall and end the terror of falling, so his very watching put pressure on them to make a slip as they dried and stacked the plates and cups.
John McGahern
#44. A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people.
John McGahern
#45. They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.
John McGahern
#46. I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television.
John McGahern
#47. When you're in danger of losing a thing it becomes precious and when it's around us, it's in tedious abundance and we take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not.
John McGahern
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