Quotes from Alice McDermott

I have not won far more awards than I have won.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

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

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.

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

Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them.

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'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 do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.

I love a well-plotted story. But I'm just not that kind of writer, and it's not necessarily by choice. When I manipulate plot, I feel I lose authenticity.

A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.

Some readers sort of suspect that you have another book that you didn't publish that has even more information in it. I think that readers sort of want to be taught something. They have this idea that there's a takeaway from a novel rather than just the being there, which I think is the great, great pleasure of reading.

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry.

We are surrounded by story.

The day and time itself: late afternoon in early February, was there a moment of the year better suited for despair?

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.

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.

It was not the future they'd been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other

For one of us at least, we knew, we were certain - this is how we saw the world - there would never again be loneliness in life.

Isn't it funny how we all die at the same time? Always at the end of our lives. Why worry?

It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past.

We turned onto the last landing. Going out with this guy, I thought, would involve a lot of silly laughter, some wit--the buzz of his whispered wisecracks in my ear. But there would be as well his willingness to reveal, or more his inability to conceal, that he had been silently rehearsing my name as he climbed the stairs behind me. There would be his willingness to bestow upon me the power to reassure him. He would trust me with his happiness.

Billy didn't need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn't poetry. It isn't prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it because every one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true.

If we could live without suffering, we'd find no peace in heaven.