John McGahern Quotes & Sayings

People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get unsure. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor. — John McGahern

But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader. — John McGahern

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

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

As looking down from great heights brings the urge to fall and end the terror of falling, so his very watching put pressure on them to make a slip as they dried and stacked the plates and cups. — John McGahern

Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood — John McGahern

His abhorrence and fear of alcohol did not extend to his power as host. He kept a huge cupboard of drinks in the station house and loved to serve large measures to visiting relatives
especially those he disliked
about which there was a definite element of spreading bait for garden snails. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts. — John McGahern

The woman dying of cancer in The Barracks facing the raw fear of everything in her life disintegrating. The abused adolescent boy in The Dark whose life is torn open for us. They are such raw books of individuals facing the terrors of life. But then these individuals began to merge more into group portraits. That's not to say he's not still searching for a balance and equilibrium in the face of those horrors - the horrors are always there in McGahern. But the celebration of wonder and of love in the face of fear and terror, the beauty in simple things, become his central preoccupation. He starts to celebrate communal bonds in a way he didn't do at all in the beginning. — John McGahern

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance. — John McGahern

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

... But all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying. — John McGahern

As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman's body, but having entered it to find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again: in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the treasure, and then the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, that knife in the unfathomable entrails; and they grow full of hatred. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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.' — John McGahern

About this time, whether he felt there wasn't sufficient drama in his life or that he was determined not to be outdone by Miss McCabe, he decided that he was dying. — John McGahern

He 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. — John McGahern

Dark, was banned by the Irish state censor for obscenity. The story was set, as so much of McGahern's later fiction would be, in isolated rural Ireland and dealt with the bleak consequences of parental and clerical child abuse. On the instructions of the Archbishop of Dublin, McGahern was sacked from his job as a primary school teacher. He later left the country. Despite these apparent setbacks, McGahern's literary friends reassured him that all this was a wonderful opportunity in terms of publicity and sales. Remember Joyce and Beckett being forced overseas? This was Irish literary history repeating itself, and preparations were soon being made to mount a campaign against the anachronistic and widely derided censorship laws with McGahern as the figurehead.
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McGahern agreed that the situation was indeed absurd, and says that even as an adolescent reader he had nothing but contempt for the censorship board. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

My father was very outwardly religious. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

For the girls the regular comings and goings restored their superior sense of self, a superiority they had received intact from Moran and which was little acknowledged by the wide world in which they had to work and live. That unexplained notion of superiority was often badly shaken and in need of restoration by the time they came home. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence. In the new dispensation all that was good in what went before is tarred indiscriminately with the bad. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

McGahern still lives on and works a farm in Leitrim, and friends say that even though he has held high profile academic posts round the world as a visiting professor he remains essentially a countryman.

Last term he taught in an upstate New York college, but seeing him in the soulless urban grid of downtown Syracuse wearing an old tweed flat cap and long black overcoat, he could have been in an Irish agricultural town on market day as he casually engaged strangers on the street to ask for advice on finding a decent restaurant. Friends say he has extraordinary confidence in who he is and where he's from - he behaves pretty much the same way wherever is and whoever he is with. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

It [love] was a passion neither of the mind nor of the heart, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. — John McGahern

A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

There's a very interesting thing that Scott Fitzgerald said [about creating characters], 'If you start with a person, you end up with a type, but if you start with a type you wind up with nothing.' You set out to discover something in your writing and it is through the attempt to discover that you reflect. If you have your mind made up about something you'll reflect nothing. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

It seems we must be taken twice, by the love that we inflict and then by the infliction of being loved, before we have the humility to look and take whatever agreeable plant that we have never seen before, because of it being all around our feet, and take it and watch it grow, choosing the lesser truth because it's all that we'll ever know. — John McGahern

I think my mother was very spiritual. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

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. — John McGahern

If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral.
John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce. — John McGahern

To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like shedding stiff, formal clothes or kicking off pinching shoes. — John McGahern

They'd listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they'd turn to each other they'd smile cruelly. He couldn't have it both ways. He'd put himself outside and outside they'd make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in. — John McGahern

Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel that by now there should be more between them than this sensual ease. Till now, for him, the luxury of this ease had been perfect. This uncomplicated pleasure seemed the very fullness of life, seemed all that life could yearn towards, and yet it could not go one forever. There comes a point in all living things when they must change or die, and maybe they had passed that point already without noticing, and that already he had lost her, when he was longing to draw closer. — John McGahern

Across her face there seemed to pass many feelings and reflections: it was as if she ached to touch and gather in and make whole those scattered years of change. But how can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh. — John McGahern

I'd much prefer to write more quickly. — John McGahern