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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
"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."
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John McGahern
"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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John McGahern
"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."
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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
"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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John McGahern
"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."
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John McGahern
"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
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John McGahern
"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."
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John McGahern
"My father was very outwardly religious."
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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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