Alice McDermott Quotes

I don't want to, in any way, characterize a race or a people or get accused of racial profiling, but the Irish, as lyrical and romantic as they can be in their poetry, they can be every bit as repressed in their personal relations.

In many immigrant families, the parents are just talking and talking about the home country until the children are like, 'Oh, don't tell us any more.'

I felt like hip-hop was my music, it was like my outsider music... but then my mom started answering our phone, 'Yo, what's up.' She was hearing me talk to my friends. I was like, 'No, mom, don't cop the hip-hop talk.'

The problem with being British... I don't know if it's me being British or being raised a strict Catholic, but you never really enjoy success.

I have four grown children and two tiny grandchildren.

There are a lot of things that immigrants, especially Chinese-Americans, want to share with their children, but there are a lot of things they don't want to share.

I'm British, so obviously I repress any powerful emotions of any kind in relation to anything.

So women are at the beginning of building a language, and not all women are conscious of it.

It's liberating to perform in another language. There are some subjects I would never talk about in French, where they see me as a public figure, that I talk about in English.

My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family.

My mum didn't understand that education was an important thing. She couldn't do my homework with me. I was helping her read stuff. She once brought shaving soap thinking it was whipped cream.

I have immigrant, African parents. They would say, in their Nigerian accents, 'So you want to be a jester?' And I was like, 'I don't want to be a court jester, Ma. I want to be a comedian.'

When it comes to a woman's expression, I don't think there's anyone who did it better than Saroj Ji.

Parents have too little respect for their children, just as the children have too much for the parents.

I had invited 50 or 60 peers and friends, most of whom were parents, to see the film [Trust], and I asked about the last scene. It was interesting because it was split right down the middle, 50/50. About half the audience wanted it to end with the very emotional scene between Clive and Liana, and that feeling of realization and catharsis. And, the other half were adamant about keeping that last scene.

Infants are interesting only to their parents.

Parents cannot expect advice to have the same force upon their children as experience has upon themselves.

Get on the fashion nerves of your peers, not your parents - that is the key to fashion leadership.

However deep our devotion may be to parents or to children, it is our contemporaries alone with whom understanding is instinctive and entire.

The young need old men. They need men who are not ashamed of age, not pathetic imitations of themselves. ... Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth.

I would say is that kids know about Bernie Sanders and they're off the radar.In the same way kids knew about Twitter before their parents did.

As you get older, all the things your parents said to you when you were younger ring true, but when you're younger, you reject them.

What's great is my parents aren't stuck in the '60s. My dad is so into the culture of today.

Remember when you used to watch TV in the Sixties and you'd see Perry Como in a cashmere sweater? That's what rock 'n' roll is becoming. It's your parents' music.

It is interesting just generationally that you see that people are much more comfortable, and that's part of life now for this next generation of actors and just people in the world. But for those of us who were living when it didn't exist, being in social media feels like the last thing you want to do .