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Top John McGahern Quotes

Browse top 34 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by John McGahern.

Favorite John McGahern Quotes

1. "…only then did I wake out of the book." ~ John McGahern
2. "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
3. "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
4. "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
5. "For the girls the regular comings and goings restored their superior sense of self, a superiority they had received intact from Moran and which was little acknowledged by the wide world in which they had to work and live. That unexplained notion of superiority was often badly shaken and in need of restoration by the time they came home." ~ John McGahern
6. "To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like shedding stiff, formal clothes or kicking off pinching shoes." ~ John McGahern
7. "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
8. "As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman's body, but having entered it to find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again: in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the treasure, and then the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, that knife in the unfathomable entrails; and they grow full of hatred." ~ John McGahern
9. "…But all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying." ~ John McGahern
10. "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
11. "Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. This uncomplicated pleasure seemed the very fullness of life, seemed all that life could yearn towards, and yet it could not go one forever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without noticing, and that already he had lost her, when he was longing to draw closer." ~ John McGahern
12. "Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long." ~ John McGahern
13. "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
14. "I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts." ~ John McGahern
15. "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
16. "But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader." ~ John McGahern
17. "Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church." ~ John McGahern
18. "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
19. "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
20. "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
21. "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
22. "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
23. "I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor." ~ John McGahern
24. "I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy." ~ John McGahern
25. "My father was very outwardly religious." ~ John McGahern
26. "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
27. "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
28. "...with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all." ~ John McGahern
29. "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
30. "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
31. "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
32. "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
33. "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
34. "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

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I'm a really huge fan of papaya juice."
Author: Andy Milonakis

What Did John McGahern Talk About?

Thin
Ten
Read
Hey
Boo
Book
Wit
Here
Hen
List
Act
Thou
Sin
Ally
Lit
Ear
Reading
Irish
Church
Sure
Ring
Cannot
Tan
Full
Came
Bring
Reader
Chin
Forever
Idea
Drama
Los
Mean
Novel
Once
Private
Less

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