For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile. – Alice McDermott
I’m always telling my students, don’t – don’t worry so much third person, first person. It doesn’t make that much difference. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
I’m very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one’s cell phone is a charming eccentricity… my children aren’t buying it. – Alice McDermott
I think ‘Charming Billy’ ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in. – Alice McDermott
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. – Alice McDermott
At the beginning of every semester, I ask my graduate students whether there is something I should read that will help me understand their work. – Alice McDermott
Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype. – Alice McDermott