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"But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader."
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"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."
"Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world."
"The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down."
"Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without."
"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."
"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."
"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."
"Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?"
"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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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