Quote

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

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Alice McDermott
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Firsts
Telling
First
Students
Much
Difference
Make
Differences
Always
Worry
Doesn
Persons
Third
Person
Thirds

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Heightism is the last unchecked prejudice.
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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!
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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.
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I'd like to be better at short, snappy answers.
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The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me.
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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.
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We are surrounded by story.
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Guilt is glorious when it's well earned.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
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