Top 33 Alice McDermott Quotes

No one looks at a baby and says, ‘You are going to be a great novelist, and you really need to start writing now.’ Something in us says: ‘This is what I must do.’

Any adjective you put before the noun ‘writer’ is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it’s feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever.

I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.

Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.

I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don’t have time to savor a whole bottle of wine.

I have not won far more awards than I have won.

Loss is inevitable – you have to be blind or naive to think otherwise.

Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype.

I was the youngest; I had two imperious older brothers – I didn’t get to often complete sentences at the dinner table. So writing was a way of saying what nobody asked me to say.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark… your words come out, and then nothing… but I don’t think that’s why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

I’m a novelist. I’m not a crusader, and I’m not an editorial writer. And I’m not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I’m interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints – life, death, time – but don’t.

Right away I think of two books – ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘Rebecca’ – and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there’s also an appealing darkness in both of them.

You’re a human being, and every time a list of prize nominations comes out and your name isn’t on it, you do have that thumb-in-the-eye feeling.

I’ve got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they’re described. That’s what I love when I read.

For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.

It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren’t ready for, like Faulkner’s, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.

I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one’s cell phone is a charming eccentricity… my children aren’t buying it.

I’ve always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.

I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.

I’m writing all the time. I tend to work on at least two books simultaneously. I’ll spend time with one, and then I’ll spend time with the other. Finishing takes whatever time it takes.

As a writer, you have to put yourself in service to the character, get behind their eyes by delineating the world where the character develops. You have to listen to the character and see him inside his certain world to know what conclusions he would draw.

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well.

I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they’re steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life.

I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there.

My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.

What interests me is whatever it is that allows the heart to continue to yearn for something the intelligence knows is impossible to have: a lost love, a shelter from life’s blows, the return of a time past, even a connection to the dead.

Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There’s a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears.

I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories.

I’m always telling my students, don’t – don’t worry so much third person, first person. It doesn’t make that much difference.

Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what’s happening inside this particular person.

I think it’s handy for a dramatist of any sort, if I can call myself that, to make use of weddings and wakes, to make use of those moments and those rituals that cause us to pause and look back or look forward and understand that life has changed.