Alice McDermott Quotes

It fills me with dismay sometimes when you look at the scripts that do come to you that are primarily focused on violence. There are so many other things to play around with.

My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.

There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'

I used to write things for friends. There was this girl I had a crush on, and she had a teacher she didn't like at school. I had a real crush on her, so almost every day I would write her a little short story where she would kill him in a different way.

To a newspaperman, a human being is an item with the skin wrapped around it.

Who does not know that kings and rulers sprang from men who were ignorant of God, who assumed because of blind greed and intolerable presumption to make themselves masters of other men, their equals, by means of pride, violence, bad faith, murder, and almost every other kind of crime? Surely the devil drove them on.

There were also very great robberies and murder of our principal men. This was done in pretense indeed for the public welfare, but in reality for the hopes of gain to themselves

O, you anarchic scum, you cowardly murderers, you leeches upon honest labor, you midnight assassins!

… the so-called sovereigns, in these different governments, are simply the heads, or chiefs, of different bands of robbers and murderers.

I knew, the second I read 'Humans,' that no matter how successful the show was, the script was superb and like nothing else I'd ever seen.

'Justified' had such dead-on beautiful scripts that you didn't want to mess with it.

There are good writers and bad writers. It's hard to find writers who really speak to you, but the work is out there.

I don't want to just traffic in sensationalism or in mere blood.

Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.

There have been times - and not just on 'The Newsroom,' but on 'The West Wing,' 'Sports Night,' 'Studio 60'... - where it was hard to look the cast and crew in the eye, when I put a script on the table that I knew just wasn't good enough.

You can fake a lot of stuff, but you can't fake if the story isn't there and if the writing isn't good.

If you are still thinking about a script after five or ten years, that's a sign that it's good - not that it's stale. And the opposite is true - if everyone wants to make your movie, that's a sign that it probably sucks.

You can make bad writing 'OK,' but... you really need to start with a good script and with characters that are three-dimensional and with great dialogue. It's a difficult lesson to learn because good writing is hard to come by, but it's definitely worth chasing.

I try to steer away from doing something that's just commercial instead of sticking to a good script.

Mainly I love working on good writing.

Of course, I write. I have stories to tell. But I don't want to do superficial stuff any more.

I believe there are two kinds of journalists. One who sells a story by being creative, and one who sells a story by being sensationalist.

The kind of scripts I have read for web shows have been outstanding.

For all the hundreds of scripts that are out there, there's not that many that are amazing.

I never maligned the sanctity of cinema in my career. I always selected themes and made films with the fervent hope that they will never demoralise viewers.