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John McGahern

"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."

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"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."

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"There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating - people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing."

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"We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones."

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"Some people break promises for the pleasure of breaking them."

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"I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari."

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"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."

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John McGahern
"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."
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John McGahern
"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."
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John McGahern
"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television."
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John McGahern
"But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader."
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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 people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners."
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John McGahern
"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 take it for granted as if we're going to live forever, which we're not."
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John McGahern
"Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church."
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John McGahern
"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."
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John McGahern
"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."
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John McGahern
"I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor."
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