To leave the everpresent tension of Great Meadow was like…

“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…

— John McGahern

“…But all life turns away from its own eventual hopelessness, leaving insomnia and its night to lovers and the dying.”

— 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…

— 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…

— John McGahern

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

— 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…

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

I'd much prefer to write more quickly.

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— John McGahern

I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was . .…

— John McGahern

“…only then did I wake out of the book.”

— John McGahern