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
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.
mother spiritual thinking
I think my mother was very spiritual.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.