Alice McDermott Quotes

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I think 'Dark Blue' came to me while I was doing a project in London. I read it, and the character immediately popped out at me.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

For me, the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

The characters emerge from my rather twisted mind. That's another enjoyable part of the job making stuff up.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.