John McGahern
John McGahern
John McGahernis regarded as one of the most important Irish writers of the latter half of the twentieth century...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth12 November 1934
CountryIreland
book ideas space
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.
religious father
My father was very outwardly religious.
ireland-and-the-irish peculiar nineteenth-century
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.
reading writing romantic-love
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.
writing discovery process
As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn't write. It's a process of discovery.
attitude kissing killing
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.
book boys advice
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.
ideas feelings pace
...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 that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.
book reading charming
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
class people catholic
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.
reading writing thinking
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.
mean chinese matter
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.
book thinking differences
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.
mean thinking catholic
I mean I think that's a fact and I think that we had a very peculiar type of Catholic Church here in that it was a fortress Church.