top of page
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more People quotes

"We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started."

"When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they may put up."

"I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments."
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."

"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."

"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."
bottom of page