John McGahern Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.”

“I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”