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
class people catholic
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.
finds until
But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.
came electricity people telephone till
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.
linked
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.
regret writing mean
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.
book reading charming
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
religious father
My father was very outwardly religious.
reading writing thinking
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.
blood together
Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood
ideas feelings pace
...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.
book boys advice
I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television.
ireland-and-the-irish peculiar nineteenth-century
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century.
taken loan given
Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it's no more than a gift on loan.
journey calm life-is
The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.