Alice McDermott Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.
-
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 wouldn't want to tweet to anyone who would be interested in my tweets.
-
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'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.
-
I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.
-
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.
-
The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.
-
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.
-
The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
-
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'm not usually drawn to memoir - many run the risk of self-aggrandizement or score-settling.
-
I learned really early on that I had to treat it as if it were a real job. This might be my middle class background - the Irish work ethic, which isn't quite the same as the Protestant work ethic - but still, it's, 'Get a job and show up every day. Be there. And don't complain. Who do you think you are: you're nobody special; go to work.'
-
Family dynamics are true over time, across generations and different cultures.
-
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.'
-
Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.
-
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.
-
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'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.
-
I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things.
-
I was born in Brooklyn, but I never lived there.
-
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.