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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."

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"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."

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Donna Grant

"The condition you're in at this moment is the product of your previous thoughts, to change your condition, change your thoughts."

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Donna Grant

"Instead of clinging to the only Lifeboat that can save, we have tossed overboard biblical truths in the name of [compromise], living on the edge of life, like the man who rides the parameter of a hurricane, daring it to sweep him away."

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Donna Grant

"There is always a path to our target, the problem is to discover it!"

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Donna Grant

"Collect memories, they are your precious property."

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Donna Grant

"From a cleansed conscience emerges a changed life."

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Donna Grant

"Simple things have greater power than the complicated things!"

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Donna Grant

"If he did not speak his tale, it grew dank and musty, it shrank inside him, while with the telling the tale stayed fresh and virtuous."

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Donna Grant

"Abundance in life comes from generosity."

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Donna Grant

"To live in bliss, love everything, including people, unconditionally."

Explore more quotes by John McGahern

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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
"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."
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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
"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."
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