top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Being quotes
"One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often."
"The nobility of a human being is strictly independent of that of his convictions."
"The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages."
"Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so."
"It feels kinda weird being back in a high school cause I haven't been in a high school for about a year. So um, it's kinda interesting coming back, and y'know seeing the lockers, with all the signs, the handmade signs, so being in high school again is a little bit strange but in a good way."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor."
"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."
"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."
"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
"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."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page