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.
From John McGahern
But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.
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.
I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
I feel I grew up in a different century than I live in. I think most of them are changes for the good.
Yes, though I have nothing but gratitude for my upbringing in the church.
I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor.
My father was very outwardly religious.
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 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.
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