Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church. — John McGahern Catholic Copy Share Image
“People are funny. They look down from all sorts of heights and then if the looking down has no effect they get… — john mcgahern Comedy Copy Share Image
I mean I think that's a fact and I think that we had a very peculiar type of Catholic Church here in… — John McGahern Catholic Copy Share Image
I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor. — John McGahern Bible Copy Share Image
“Time should have stopped with the clocks but instead it moved in a glazed dream of tiredness without their ticking insistence.” — John McGahern Clock Copy Share Image
Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one's own blood — John McGahern Copy Share Image
“…But all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying.” — John McGahern Death Copy Share Image
The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance. — John McGahern Demand Copy Share Image
I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or… — John McGahern Australia Copy Share Image
“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.… — John McGahern Abuse Copy Share Image
I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the… — John McGahern Books Copy Share Image
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… — John McGahern Abundance Copy Share Image
The rosary was said every evening. I always liked that sentence about the medieval Churches, that they were the Bibles of the… — John McGahern Bible Copy Share Image
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice… — John McGahern Advice Copy Share Image
“Across her face there seemed to pass many feelings and reflections: it was as if she ached to touch and gather in… — John McGahern Change Copy Share Image
“For the girls the regular comings and goings restored their superior sense of self, a superiority they had received intact from Moran… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
“As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman's body, but having entered it to find themselves as… — John McGahern Desire Copy Share Image
...with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
“Dark, was banned by the Irish state censor for obscenity. The story was set, as so much of McGahern's later fiction would… — John McGahern Censorship Copy Share Image
“Sensing her hard separateness in their separate footsteps as they walked towards her home in the sleeping suburbs, he began to feel… — John McGahern Fullness of life Copy Share Image
“McGahern still lives on and works a farm in Leitrim, and friends say that even though he has held high profile academic… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
“The woman dying of cancer in The Barracks facing the raw fear of everything in her life disintegrating. The abused adolescent boy… — John McGahern Death Copy Share Image
I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years. — John McGahern Copy Share Image
As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn't write. It's a process of discovery. — John McGahern Discovery Copy Share Image
“To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like shedding stiff, formal clothes or kicking off pinching shoes.” — John McGahern Copy Share Image
I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts. — John McGahern Facts Copy Share Image
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy. — John McGahern Copy Share Image
Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader. — John McGahern Copy Share Image
My favorite optimist was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was… — John McGahern Copy Share Image
The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I… — John McGahern Chinese Copy Share Image
When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to… — John McGahern Art Copy Share Image
