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"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
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"If you want to know the value of a minute ask the person who came to the train station or airport a minute late."
"Don't equate effective living to being busy."
"When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?"
"Don't depend on the thoughts, "I need more time". There are only 24 hours in each day. You can't make it 25 or 26. You just have to plan your activities very well so as to achieve the expected things with the natural time limit."
"Four days will quickly steep themselves in nightsFour nights will quickly dream away the time."
Explore more quotes by John McGahern
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
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