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
thinking facts serious
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
eight years long
I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.
thinking different grew
I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.
suffering fiction doe
Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.
book thinking church
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.
writing discovery process
As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn't write. It's a process of discovery.
attitude kissing killing
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.
thinking differences able
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.
rain sky identity
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.
empires window building
My favorite optimist was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window washers heard him say, 'So Far, so good.'