Top 40 John McGahern Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— John McGahern

2. “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.”

— John McGahern

3. “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.”

— John McGahern

4. “I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world.”

— John McGahern

5. “I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.”

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

7. “Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there’s the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.”

— John McGahern

8. “My father was very outwardly religious.”

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

10. “As a writer, I write to see. If I knew how it would end, I wouldn’t write. It’s a process of discovery.”

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

12. “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.”

— John McGahern

13. “My favorite optimist was an American who jumped off the Empire State Building, and as he passed the 42nd floor, the window washers heard him say, ‘So Far, so good.’”

— John McGahern

14. “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.”

— John McGahern

15. “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.”

— John McGahern

16. “The days were quiet. They did not feel particularly quiet or happy but through them ran the sense, like an underground river, that there would come a time when these days would be looked back on as happiness, all that life could give of contentment and peace.”

— John McGahern

17. “As looking down from great heights brings the urge to fall and end the terror of falling, so his very watching put pressure on them to make a slip as they dried and stacked the plates and cups.”

— John McGahern

18. “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.”

— John McGahern

19. “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.”

— John McGahern

20. “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.”

— John McGahern

21. “Across her face there seemed to pass many feelings and reflections: it was as if she ached to touch and gather in and make whole those scattered years of change. But how can time be gathered in and kissed? There is only flesh.”

— John McGahern

22. “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.”

— John McGahern

23. “I think my mother was very spiritual.”

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

25. “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.”

— John McGahern

26. “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.”

— John McGahern

27. “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.”

— John McGahern

28. “I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.”

— John McGahern

29. “They’d listen silenty, with grave faces: but once they’d turn to each other they’d smile cruelly. He couldn’t have it both ways. He’d put himself outside and outside they’d make him stay. Neither brutality nor complaining could force a way in.”

— John McGahern

30. “I’d much prefer to write more quickly.”

— John McGahern

31. “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.”

— John McGahern

32. “Nothing ever holds together unless it is mixed with some of one’s own blood.”

— John McGahern

33. “When a long abuse of power is corrected, it is generally replaced by an opposite violence. In the new dispensation all that was good in what went before is tarred indiscriminately with the bad.”

— John McGahern

34. “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.”

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

36. “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.”

— John McGahern

37. “I’ve never written anything that hasn’t been in my mind for a long time – seven or eight years.”

— John McGahern

38. “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.”

— John McGahern

39. “A priest could have no anguish, he’d given up happiness, his fixed life moving in the calm of certainty into its end, cursed by no earthly love or longing, all had been chosen years before.”

— John McGahern

40. “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.”

— John McGahern

41. “Time should have stopped with the clocks but instead it moved in a glazed dream of tiredness without their ticking insistence.”

— John McGahern

42. “He felt a keen regret that he had spoken so of Dave Masters, the defiant boy they both had loved, whose ghost had held them, all these years, in a friendship whose depth they had never quite realized.”

— John McGahern

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

— John McGahern

44. “You were a beautiful child,” he heard himself saying, and for a moment he did not know to whom he spoke. Light swam before his eyes, found shape, and became the face of his daughter, lined and somber and worn with care.”

— John McGahern