Quotes from John McGahern

I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.

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.

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 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 my mother was very spiritual.

The best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.

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.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

Among its many other obligations, fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint, and much of what takes place is believable only because it happens.

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.

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

That's one thing can't be bought is brains. Only God can give brains. And they don't come off the wind either.

There are no things more cruel than truths about ourselves spoken to us by another that are perceived to be at least half true. Left unsaid and hidden we feel they can be changed or eradicated, in time.

Cool, calm and collected, the three seas of wisdom and success.

I suppose that's how you get old. You find yourself not doing a whole lot of things you once did without thought.

Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) alone with a book the whole razzmatazz of prizes, banquets, television spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among those solitary readers, it will not live . . . or live for long.

The light of water showed through the tree trunks as they drew close to the narrow wood along the lake but once on the fringe of the trees they lost all resentment at the sight of the thick floor of bluebells beneath the trees.

A man is born. He dies.

with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.

Sometimes I think he's as happy as anybody." The words hung in the air a moment without meeting agreement or disagreement: it was as if they both knew secretly that there was no certainty as to what constituted the happiness or unhappiness of another.

As he listened to the two voices he was so attached to and thought back to the afternoon, the striking of the clocks, the easy, pleasant company, the walk round the shore, with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness.

A local butcher offered me money to put in my next book a portrayal of a customer he didn't like that would make him ashamed to show his face in the town. It was like the tradition of the Gaelic poets, who were paid money to write in derision about people.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.