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But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.

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.

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

Reading

Writing

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.

John McGahern

Language

Saying

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

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

John McGahern

Time

Reading

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970.

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.

I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.

My father was very outwardly religious.

John McGahern