Alice McDermott Quotes

I approach writing stories as a recorder. I think of my role as some kind of reporting device - recording and projecting.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

As a fiction writer, my favorite tools are my imagination and the peculiar opportunities offered by different points of view.

In journalism I can only tell what happened. In fiction, I can show it.

I never thought I could write fiction.

In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

I will never write fiction.

I don't think I have the kind of creativity to write fiction.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

Contrary to all those times you've heard a writer confess at a reading that he writes fiction because he is a pathological liar, fiction writing is all about telling the truth.

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes.

Fiction is experimentation; when it ceases to be that, it ceases to be fiction.

I don't write tracts, I write novels. I'm not a preacher, I'm a fiction writer.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.

Fiction is very important to me. It's what I do, it's what I do with my life.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

I love telling stories. Creating a character, a world, a whole universe out of nothing. That part I can't get enough of.

I enjoy receiving and giving realistic fiction, for both children and adults, with strong characters, beautiful language, and humane visions.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

I've written fiction for as long as I can remember; it's always been my preferred form of play.