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"I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer."
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"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."
"He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves."
"People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy."
"Prune - prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually."
"Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years."
"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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