115 Quotes by Alice McDermott

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

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.

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 think 'Charming Billy' ultimately is a novel about faith and what we believe in and, above all, what we choose to believe in.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

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

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.

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.

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.