Alice McDermott Quotes
I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.

Quotes to Explore
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I think the best president - because he changed the whole mood of the country, the whole economy of the country, and stood up to Communism... that was continuing its causes around the world, and backed them off and caused them to collapse - and that was Ronald Reagan.
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I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.
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Whenever I'm in Des Moines, I always make a trip to Manhattan Deli for a sandwich. I spent a lot of time there when I was going to college at Drake, so it's usually my one 'go-to' food stop when I'm in town.
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The world is indeed a mixture of truth and make-believe. Discard the make-believe and take the truth.
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I just try to keep myself a traditionalist. I liked being an underground comic doing my thing. I want to maintain that. I just do.
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I came back to do a live concert. Nobody had done that before and I know my managers were worried.
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Brooklyn's good. Brooklyn's funky. Brooklyn's happening.
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As film-makers, it is very important for us to find common ground between cultures, and maybe that's less the case for politicians who benefit more from finding the conflicts and differences between us.
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Writing a novel is like knocking on a door that will never open. You are so desperate to get in, you will say or do anything. You feel: please take my novel.
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When you're really close to someone, they can make fun of you a lot and get away with it. But they sort of poke you in all of the right places.
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I'm coming to this world not to work. I want to come to this world to enjoy my life. I don't want to die in my office. I want to die on the beaches.
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Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.
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My mother gave me a push. If I hadn't had her, maybe I wouldn't have had the push. If I hadn't gone to military school, maybe I wouldn't have decided to get with the program. Maybe I'd be running a bulldozer, rather than going on and doing something more.
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I want to move people the way Edith Piaf did.
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I'm much too young to feel this damn old.
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If a child wants to read 'Twilight' over Middlemarch, they should be encouraged - the important thing is to get them reading in the first place.
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In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support.
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I understand that the end does not justify the means. And this should be a lasting value for democracy.
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Any concept of biology is not only sterile and profitless, it is distorted and untrue, if it puts its primary focus on unnatural conditions rather than on those vast forces not of man's making that shape and channel the nature and direction of life.
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Small debts are like small shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped without a wound: great debts are like cannon; of loud noise, but little danger.
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We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.
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I firmly believe that the mission of religion in the 21st century must be to contribute concretely to the peaceful coexistence of humankind.
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There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
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I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.