John McGahern Quotes

It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

How could 30 years be the blink-of-the-eye it felt? It was the difference between black-and-white footage of the Second World War and David Bowie on 'Top of the Pops' singing 'Life on Mars.'

A huge change has taken place in my lifetime.

The good of other times let people state; I think it lucky I was born so late.

… science is the great instrument of social change, all the greater because its object is not change but knowledge, and its silent appropriation of this dominant function, amid the din of political and religious strife, is the most vital of all the revolutions which have marked the development of modern civilization.

We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.

Some people accuse the new generation of being ignorant, maybe ignorant for the old generation, but it's a new language.

You don't have to be old in America to say of a world you lived in: That world is gone.

My successor may need to be more modern than I am. It's a question of generations.

But the history of the changes produced by a universal idea is not a history of changes in the individual, but of changes brought about by the successive efforts of millions of individuals in the course of many generations.

Saudi Arabia has also changed. People today are connecting with each other all across the world through small gadgets and television. It's a different society.

One can't help but be a bit melancholy when you see how the world has changed, and I don't mean that nostalgically.

I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

Over the past few years, many of us have increasingly begun to question the direction and meaning of our society as it has developed over the past several centuries.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

Do you believe that life today is the same as it was 10 centuries ago? This tremendous change was produced by the West. Who else produced it?

The world changes fast, and a lot of the old country folks have a hard time keeping up with it, and it makes them sad.

I appreciate the change associated with people's growth, but I don't like the changes in our lives. I came to Mumbai in 1945, so imagine my acceptance of the massive changes around. I have witnessed every kind of revolution.

Audiences change because life changes. Countries change geographically, climatically, socially and morally. Many things happen, and cinema, in a sense, reflects what's happening in the world.

Indian cinema is changing not because of outside pressure but because of inside pressure. Society is changing. Obviously, ideas change because of globalization, because of the huge middle class that is mostly first generation.

What we need to do is open our eyes, smell the coffee and just understand what the society has become. Today, I can discuss many things with my 15-year-old son which I could not talk about with my father.