Alice McDermott Quotes

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet.

I always love writing about children.

I love books, and I love to read, and I had ideas for books that I thought would be neat to read.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.

My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.

I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

Read everything! I believe that reading made me a writer.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

Sure, best seller. I'd love to knock Stephen King off the top of the list. I know I won't, but, after all, I spend my life inventing a different reality.

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

I was reading C.S. Lewis with my mom, and she was pointing out that he was dead, and I'm like, 'What do you mean he's dead?' We were in this world he created, and he was gone from the Earth. Yet in those black marks on a white page, his imagination lived on, his voice lived on. That is so miraculous.

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find.

Writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated deep down, by a fear or and fascination with mortality - by a desire to make the risky trip to the underworld and to bring something or someone back from the dead.

I love being an author. I love actual writing, and I love communicating with children. And it keeps me young.

Writing a book is an adventure.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.