Quote

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed.

Alice McDermott

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alice McDermott
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Place
Live
World
Vulgar
Required
Supposed
Known
Language

More quotes by Alice McDermott

Image
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
Image
The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.
Alice McDermott
Image
It now appears that the world is filled with people who believe that everyone should be interested in everything they have to say about anything - people who tweet, you might call them. I find this so astonishing, my own hubris pales in comparison.
Alice McDermott
Image
I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.
Alice McDermott
Image
We are surrounded by story.
Alice McDermott
Image
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.
Alice McDermott
Image
A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.
Alice McDermott
Image
A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
Alice McDermott
Image
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.
Alice McDermott
Image
In the reading and writing life, delight, for me, is where the mystery lies. Easy enough to figure out how scenes of violence or tragedy or titillation or grossness or even sentimentality can move us, but how the written word elicits delight - what Nabokov calls that shiver in the spine - is much harder to calculate and define.
Alice McDermott
Image
Fiction that intends to be something other than entertainment has a certain obligation, I think, to convince the reader, every time, that what is to be evoked - character, experience, idea - is worthy of his or her consideration, intellectual energy, close attention.
Alice McDermott
Image
Without explaining why, and, most of all, without naming other authors or books, I can only say my novels are influenced by love and death.
Alice McDermott
Image
We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers!
Alice McDermott
Image
My love for the child asleep in the crib, the child's need for me, for my vigilance, had made my life valuable in a way that even the most abundantly offered love, my parents', my brother's, even Tom's, had failed to do. Love was required of me now--to be given, not merely to be sought and returned.
Alice McDermott
Image
Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.
Alice McDermott
Image
Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.
Alice McDermott
Image
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.
Alice McDermott