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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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"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

"The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting above average effort."

"People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy."

"Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances."

"A lot of people over the years have been doing yoga and I think even more these days are expressing an interest in it. So there are a lot of manifestations of spirituality here in town."

"When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen."

"Sometimes those fears creep into the back of your head, but then you slap yourself and think, 'Oh, woe is me! People actually like me.' What a silly thing to worry about. This is a huge opportunity, and I'm excited."

"We tried to set up a company that patterned ourselves after Southwest in all the fun, the spirit, the great people, the smile, the efficiency side of it, but we've added some extras that people aren't used to finding on Southwest."
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."

"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'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 love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor."

"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."

"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 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."

"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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