Top 30 Alice McDermott Quotes

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 think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.

In grammar school I read ‘Act One’ by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have… But I never did write a play.

The language of the Catholic Church – the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels – was in many ways my first poetry.

Family dynamics are true over time, across generations and different cultures.

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

Most of the characters I write with don’t think an awful lot about their faith. They’re not always questioning the church or feeling confined by the church or rebelling against the church.

After a long run of almost thirty years, you get to the point where you say, ‘These are my concerns.’ It’s not so much this is what I set out to claim – it is a kind of refrain.

I guess I cringe when the discussion leads to, rather than books and sentences and characters and the stuff that writers are supposed to be concerned with, how to have an online presence and how many followers you have on Twitter. That stuff always makes me uncomfortable.

My children have gone to Catholic school… Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you’re only 15 or 16 – thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations.

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 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.

Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I’ve always been interested in that.

I think place and time for me is often a matter of convenience, something I can use to another end rather than something I’m trying to define because it’s somehow fascinating to me in itself. It’s more what the place can do for the larger goals I have for the work.

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

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

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.

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

For me, having characters who are part of a faith then allows me to talk about how that faith either works or fails them without having to attack the institution.

I don’t want to write about violence, and I don’t want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it’s cheap.

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

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.

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’m a coastal person. I grew up in Long Island and lived in San Diego. I felt landlocked in Pittsburgh. Psychically, it just wasn’t the place for me.

My own ‘sentimental favorite’ is always the novel I haven’t yet written – I suppose that’s the one I consider my ‘masterpiece’ as well.

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.

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

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

I’m more interested in character than events. I’ve observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.