John McGahern Quotes

Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.