Irish - Writer | November 12, 1934 - March 30, 2006
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
John McGahern
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I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.
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Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church.
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I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.
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My father was very outwardly religious.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.
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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.
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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.
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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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