Art & Creativity Quote by John McGahern

McGahern makes reading sound almost illicitly ordinary: not a ladder to self-improvement, not a curated syllabus, but a habit as casual and consuming as TV. The sly brilliance is in the comparison. Television is supposed to be passive, spoon-fed; books are supposed to be noble, effortful. By collapsing that distinction, he punctures the cultural pieties around “proper” reading and quietly defends appetite over instruction.

“I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back” evokes a rural-library rhythm: circulation as a kind of migration, the reader shuttling between scarcity and plenty. The numbers matter. It’s not one treasured volume, reverently finished. It’s a binge, a rummage, a kid’s greed for story and sensation. That blunt logistics also hints at class and access: whatever else he lacked, the library (or school) offered a renewable stash. The line “Nobody gave me direction or advice” lands with double force. On the surface it’s a memory of freedom; underneath it’s an indictment of a culture that withholds guidance from certain children, leaving them to educate themselves by accident.

McGahern’s fiction is steeped in Irish provincial life, authority, and the quiet violence of institutions (family, church, school). This recollection reframes his formation as self-directed survival. He read “much in the way that a boy might watch television”: indiscriminately, hungrily, for escape and for company. That’s the subtextual claim: literature doesn’t only refine you. Sometimes it simply keeps you alive long enough to become the person who can write it.