Alice McDermott Quotes

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

Through writing, one experiences something different to what one experiences with the five senses one has because language is a different metier.

...words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

Find something you like, go into a room, close the door and read it aloud. Read it aloud. Everybody in the world who likes dance can see dance, or hear music, or see art, or admire architecture - but everybody in the world uses words who is not a recluse or mute. But the writer has to take these most common things, more common than musical notes or dance positions, a writer has to take some adverbs, and verbs and nouns and ball them up together and make them bounce.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?

If you can talk, you can write.

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Words are my life.

I know a lot about words. I get paid to write stories, so I get to talk with people about the meaning behind words all day.

I love words, and I love that there's so many words available to make a point and to create a picture.

All people in the world - who are not hermits or mutes - speak words. They speak different languages, but they speak words. They say, "How are you" or "I'm not feeling well" all over the world. These common words - these common elements that we have between us - the writer has to take some verbs and nouns and pronouns and adjectives and adverbs and arrange them in a way that sound fresh.

Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.

Those things for which we find words, are things we have already overcome.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

Writing is the great invention of the world.

Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Technology is a vocabulary and a language in which you can say many things.

Words. Words. I play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what I want.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world.

Isn't telling about something-using words, English or Japanese-already something of an invention? Isn't just looking upon this world already something of an invention?

I'm very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

Remarks are not literature.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.