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" 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

School

High School

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" I'm very conscious of trying to make something epic out of something small and ordinary. "

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

" Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me. "

Alice McDermott

Being

Hand

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm always telling my students, don't - don't worry so much third person, first person. It doesn't make that much difference. "

" 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. "

" 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

Phone

I Am

" My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well. "

" I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine. "

" I'm a coastal person. I grew up in Long Island and lived in San Diego. I felt landlocked in Pittsburgh. Psychically, it just wasn't the place for me. "

" 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. "

Alice McDermott

Think

End

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

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

" For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile. "

" 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. "

" I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience. "

" Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype. "

" Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that. "

" 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. "

" I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life. "

" Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories. "

" 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. "

" 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. "