The 35+ John McGahern Quotes

I Feel I Grew Up In A Different Century Than I Live In. I Think Most Of Them Are Changes For The Good.

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.

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.

My Father Was Very Outwardly Religious.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, Though I Have Nothing But Gratitude For My Upbringing In The Church.

I've Never Written Anything That Hasn't Been In My Mind For A Long Time - Seven Or Eight Years.

I Think My Mother Was Very Spiritual.

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.