Alice McDermott Quotes

I am an internationally produced playwright.

I never wanted to be a playwright.

When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

I'm a writer. I'm not an actress.

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

My father was a writer and an acting teacher.

When I was really young I didn't know that there was such a thing as a screenwriter. I wrote stories.

Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.

When I was about 12, I spent the summer writing four plays on my dad's old typewriter for a school play competition. And I wrote little comic bits at secondary school and at university.

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

Broadway's never my end goal because of the plays I write. These are tough plays. Of course there's a lot of humor, but my goal is just to reach as wide an audience as possible, however that happens.

I want to write novels, and I want to write and direct theater.

A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.

It's a lucky life to be a playwright.

I wrote my first play when I was nine. It was performed at Hampstead Theatre.

I didn't study writing or drama or anything like that... that was not really a viable route for me.

I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.

So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.

It's hard to find a play that's right for me to do. Rather than waiting around for the right script to come along, I decided to write one myself.

Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.