John McGahern
John McGahern
John McGahernis regarded as one of the most important Irish writers of the latter half of the twentieth century...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 November 1934
CountryIreland
book editors long
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.
forever losing abundance
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.
reading writing romantic-love
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.
book ideas space
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.
real mean australia
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.
writing
I'd much prefer to write more quickly.
mother spiritual thinking
I think my mother was very spiritual.
mean chinese matter
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.
book thinking differences
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.
mean thinking catholic
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.
distance imagination demand
The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.
beautiful mean people
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.
printed-word church gothic
I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.
gratitude church upbringing
Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church.