John McGahern Quotes

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

  John McGahern

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• My father was very outwardly religious.

  John McGahern

• 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

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

  John McGahern

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  John McGahern

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

  John McGahern

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

  John McGahern

• 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

John McGahern (25)

Birth:	12th November, 1934
Death:	30th March, 2006
Nationality:	Irish
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

About

John McGahern was born in Leitrim, Ireland. He was an Irish novelist and short story writer. He studied at St Patrick's College in Dublin, and the University College Dublin. He wrote several novels include: The Barracks, The Dark, The Leavetaking, The pornographer, Amongst Women (Won- The Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literary Award in 1991. Shortlisted- Booker Prize in 1990), and That They may Face the Rising Sun (Nominated- International Dublin Literary Award). His non-fiction works, including Memoir (autobiography), and Love of the World (essays). He wrote several short stories include: Nightlines, Getting Through, High Ground, Collected Stories, and Creatures of the Earth.

Related Authors

• Tristan Bernard
• Sarah Ockler
• Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
• Robert Stone
• William McIlvanney
• Gene Wolfe
• Terry Bisson
• James Michael Pratt
• James Patrick Hogan
• Ralph Ellison

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 4th April

Births

• 1928 - Maya Angelou
• 1942 - Kitty Kelley
• 1792 - Thaddeus Stevens
• 1888 - Tris Speaker
• 1970 - Barry Pepper

Deaths

• 1990 - Cyrus Rowlett Smith
• 1883 - Peter Cooper
• 1841 - William Henry Harrison
• 1991 - Max Frisch
• 1284 - Alfonso X of Castile