All John McGahern Quotes
I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.
John McGahern
50% of people like this quote
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
50% of people like this quote
But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.
John McGahern
49% of people like this quote
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
48% of people like this quote
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
48% of people like this quote
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
46% of people like this quote
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
46% of people like this quote
I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.
John McGahern
44% of people like this quote
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
44% of people like this quote
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% of people like this quote
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