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