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
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.
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
I'd much prefer to write more quickly.
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.
regret writing mean
I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was . . . it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.
linked
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.
finds until
But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.
book reading charming
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
religious father
My father was very outwardly religious.
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.
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 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.
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.
taken loan given
Anything that is given can be at once taken away. We have to learn never to expect anything, and when it comes it's no more than a gift on loan.