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"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space."
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"Here is the real domino theory - gay man to gay man, bisexual man to straight woman, addict mother to newborn baby, they all fall down and someday it will come to you."
"Mrs. Binnie says we throw out more with a spoon than the men can be bringing in with a shovel...Binnie-like. Our men like the good living. And what if we don't be having too much money, Patsy dear? Sure and we do have lashings of things no money could be buying. There'll be enough squeezed out for Cuddles when the time comes. The Good Man Above will be seeing to that."
"My dad and mom did what a lot of parents did at the time. They sacrificed a lot of their life and used a lot of their disposable income to make sure their children were educated."
"Jason's got a family, so it's difficult for us to get together."
"Of course, everyone's parents are embarrassing. It goes with the territory. The nature of parents is to embarrass merely by existing, just as it is the nature of children of a certain age to cringe with embarrassment, shame, and mortification should their parents so much as speak to them on the street."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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."
"We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places."
"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
"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."
"I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years."
"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."
"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."
"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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