Alice McDermott Quotes

All a work of art can do is present the surface. I can't know the insides of people. I know very little about the inside of myself.

I do seem to have a lot of family secrets in my novels. I guess I'm one of those writers who is often writing about the same sort of themes, but taking different angles on them.

Poetry is to be found nowhere unless we carry it within us.

Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel.

The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

Everything I do tries to do the same thing, which is to express things that are hard to express, hidden things.

Poets are always right. History is on their side.

Art is the skin of the soul.

Since my subjects have always been my sensations, my states of mind and the profound reactions that life has been producing in me, I have frequently objectified all this in figures of myself, which were the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.

Every character in each of my movies is a different side of myself.

Improvisation is not the expression of accident but rather of the accumulated yearnings, dreams and wisdom of our very soul.

The poetry is myself.

I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize

Poetry forces a writer to condense and crystallise his thoughts and often represents a short cut to truths unsuspected by the author himself.

I suppose that it's my impulse to mine, as a writer, these scary parts of ourselves and the world.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Some of us – poets are not exactly poets. We live sometimes – beyond the word.

Sometimes only poetry can say it. I think there's just this deeper language, and away of putting your world back together again and breaking through barriers.

You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

I really believe one of the jobs of a writer is to stretch as far as you can into other voices.

Poetry is, above all, an approach to the truth of feeling.

All technical refinements discourage me. Perfect photography, larger screens, hi-fi sound, all make it possible for mediocrities slavishly to reproduce nature; and this reproduction bores me. What interests me is the interpretation of life by an artist. The personality of the film maker interests me more than the copy of an object.

Literature must spring from the deep and submerged humus of our life.