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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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"I read some, and then visited with people involved in this curious, exciting and somewhat misunderstood sub-culture. I met with a fang maker, who offered to fit me for an exquisite pair."

"There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies."

"I am attracted to people who make this effort in knowing what suits them - they are individual and stylish."

"I'm not a slave to objectivity. I'm never quite sure what it means. And it means different things to different people."

"Now how many people in their heart of hearts in that community want to see the demise of this country? How many would cheer, not out loud maybe, but in their heart when things like 9/11 occur and I'll tell you; it's a majority among them."

"You've got people who are looking at DNA evidence and other evidence like that and they're ignoring it."

"Well, I guess most people would only know me from The O.C. I did a few episodes of Gilmore Girls before that. I was also a client on a lot of lawyer shows."

"Well, of course, people are only human... But it really does not seem much for them to be."
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."

"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."

"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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