Alice McDermott Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I'm not usually drawn to memoir - many run the risk of self-aggrandizement or score-settling.
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A tendency to make metaphorical connections is an occupational hazard for those of us who write.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.
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For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile.
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Loss is inevitable - you have to be blind or naive to think otherwise.
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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.
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Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn.
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I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary.
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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.
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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.
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All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was.
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I have not won far more awards than I have won.
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Those of us who know the transporting wonder of a reading life know that it little matters where we are when we talk about books or meet authors or bemoan the state of publishing because when we read, we are always inside, sheltered in that interior room, that clean, well-lighted, timeless place that is the written word.
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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.
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Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.