Alice McDermott

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

I think it's handy for a dramatist of any sort, if I can call myself that, to make use of weddings and wakes, to make use of those moments and those rituals that cause us to pause and look back or look forward and understand that life has changed. ”

I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well. ”

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. ”

I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't. ”

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

Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”