John McGahern Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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While the older generation is content to sit around and critique culture, that culture is moving beyond them. At some point the traditional church and all of the expressions of that church will become essentially irrelevant.
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It was inevitable at some point that I would bump into one of my father's plays. The reality of the situation is that I'm a jobbing actor, and any actor would give their eye-teeth to have one of those roles. It's a no-brainer! I'm pleased the stars have aligned around 'Arcadia.'
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As I've traveled around the country, it has surprised me how many times I've heard people in small businesses use that word 'saved.' I believe many small businesses would not have had access to credit and would not have survived without the $50 billion that we were able to put into the market.
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I do this thing at every party: I go to a party, I stand around for, like, 45 minutes, and then I turn to my wife and say, 'I think we should go home.' And then we leave, and then I wake up the next morning and say to my wife, 'We don't go out anymore.' It's a great trick.
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The lesson of 'CSI' is: No matter what horrible things happen, nice policemen will turn up and fix everything and return it to the status quo.
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Any government that has a sincere desire for reform and progress should understand the benefit of objective and constructive criticism.
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Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.
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One cannot plan for the unexpected.
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We think of Washington as the defensive-minded pragmatist who won the Revolution by avoiding unnecessary risks on the battlefield. But that was not how he started out.
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We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.
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I always have to have my lipstick. Sometimes I have more than one shade: start with one color for the morning, one for night. Sometimes I have a couple shades just in case I need something more powerful for the day.
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You feel like you need to deal with a lot if you're from Cleveland, so you learn to let things roll off your back, and you learn that humor is the best way to deal with it.
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Pay your people the least possible and you'll get from them the same.
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Let me say what I actually believe. I believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, by Al Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden, and no one else trying to hurt America.
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I love stories about two people who are doing illegal things, who we really enjoy watching despite the fact that we know they are doomed in some way.
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I really feel like I honed in on a sound and a style of writing that best fits me.
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There was a verse that said if you are lukewarm rather than hot or cold, God will spit you out of his mouth on Judgment Day. And I felt like, I mean, I don't know. I'm lukewarm.
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I think for a lot of amateurs, their alignment is always out.
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I don't remake any movie, whether old or of other language.
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A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. You must break out of your current comfort zone and become comfortable with the unfamiliar and the unknown.
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I can't create music if I'm wearing a mask and not being myself, and that was the problem with The Czars.
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Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
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Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.
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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.
