115 Quotes by Alice McDermott

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that.

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from.

We are surrounded by story.

The lesson, I suppose, is that none of us have much control over how we will be remembered. Every life is an amalgam, and it is impossible to know what moments, what foibles, what charms will come to define us once we're gone. All we can do is live our lives fully, be authentically ourselves, and trust that the right things about us, the best and most fitting things, will echo in the memories of us that endure.

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.

Family dynamics are true over time, across generations and different cultures.

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.

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.