"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."

Being, Nonsense

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"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."

Explore more quotes by 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."

Life, Artist, Expression, First

"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."

People, Community, Electricity, Example

"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."

Attitude, Thought, Killing, Kissing

"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."

Being, Nonsense

"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."

Time, Books, Consciousness, Difference

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

Time, Mind, Years

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

Time, Reading

"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."

Language, Saying

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

Love, Churches, Poor, Word

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

Truth, Facts, Fiction

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"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible."

Vladimir Nabokov, American Novelist

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"Being is more important than doing."

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"You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself."

Ernest Hemingway, American Novelist

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"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."

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"Being a blockhead is sometimes the best security against being cheated by a man of wit."

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, French Writer

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"It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal."

George Eliot, British Author

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"And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness."

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"There is more pleasure in loving than in being beloved."

Thomas Fuller, English Clergyman

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"The secret of being a bore... is to tell everything."

Voltaire, French Writer

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"No man lives without jostling and being jostled; in all ways he has to elbow himself through the world, giving and receiving offence."

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish Philosopher

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