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"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."
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"Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language."
"It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
"Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour."
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"Although profanity is part of our language that we speak everyday, it can simultaneity be used as a weapon to demoralize other people if it is offensive within its meaning."
"A cliche is everything you've ever heard of."
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."
"I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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