Education Quote by John McGahern

McGahern isn’t offering cozy advice; he’s drawing a line between the teachable and the earned. “Technique can be taught” concedes the workshop economy its due: you can learn point of view, scene, rhythm, the basic carpentry of sentences. Then he pivots to what can’t be packaged. “The only way to learn to write is to read” is less a slogan than a rebuke to the fantasy of self-generated originality, the idea that voice arrives fully formed if you just grit your teeth at the desk.

The subtext is apprenticeship. Reading isn’t “inspiration,” it’s exposure: to structures you didn’t invent, emotional registers you didn’t know were possible, moral complexity you might otherwise avoid. McGahern’s work - spare, attentive to social constraint, saturated with Irish rural and clerical life - depends on an ear trained by other voices. The claim that reading and writing are “completely related” is also a claim about humility: the writer is first a listener.

Context matters here. McGahern came up in a mid-century Ireland where censorship and cultural gatekeeping narrowed the available public language; to read widely was to widen the world. When he says “One almost couldn’t exist without the other,” he’s pointing to a feedback loop: reading teaches you what writing can do; writing teaches you how to read, turning you into a sharper critic of your own evasions. It’s a neat inversion of the romantic myth: talent isn’t a lightning strike, it’s a sustained intimacy with books.