“By making breath more evident, more material, more dwelled-upon, they make black breath matter, implicitly insist that black lives matter.”

“. . . The Greeks regarded what we call ‘public’ experience as part of human experience. This is what gives such ground and scope and humanity to Greek poetry at its greatest.”

“Sufism . . . it gives relief in the midst of battle . . . ”

“Raymond Chandler [has said]: ‘No art without the resistance of the medium.’ But the resistance mustn't be gratuitously imported for tactical purposes.”

“As you grow older, there’s no reason why you can’t be wiser as a novelist than you ever were before. You should know more about human nature every year of your life.”

“I don’t know if I need seclusion, but I do like to be alone in a room.”

“Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.”

“The 'I' character in journalism is almost pure invention.”

On his play Bobby Gould in Hell: “The Devil says [to Bobby], ‘Nothing's black and white; nothing's black and white—what about a panda? What about a panda, you dumb fuck!’”

“I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.”

“To think of posterity nowadays is ludicrous because things do not last. Books seem to last more than films or records but even they do not last very long.”

“I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It’s a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.”

“[The zoologist George Schaller and I] had walked away from civilization through mythic mountains and ancient villages in clear October light—but what a pity to say that to each other!”

“Sartre expressed the despair of this generation. He did not create it, but he gave it a justification and a style.”

“My younger daughter told me recently that when she was a child she thought the typewriter was a toy that I went into my room and closed the door and played with.”

“Point of view is the problem that everybody’s been up against since Joyce, if not before. I think this technical development has become absolutely killing to the novel.”

“Lowell, who was the most exhaustingly literary person I’d ever met, I’ve always considered the master of rhetoric. He told me once that he worked over a line ‘until it sounds like Lowell.’”

“Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what's been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new.”

Before I met Alice McDermott, I’d heard a story: when her students became distracted with excitement after she won the National Book Award for Charming Billy (1998), she settled the class down by offering a hundred dollars to anyone who remembered the last winner. As the rumor went, she kept her money. Not one M.F.A. student of fiction could recall the winner or the book (Charles Frazier, for Cold Mountain).

This is a revealing wager from a writer as recognized by awards committees as McDermott; her novel That Night (1987) was a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize; At Weddings and Wakes (1992) was also a finalist for the Pulitzer. Charming Billy won an American Book Award as well as the National Book Award. Child of My Heart (2002) was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. After This (2006) was yet another finalist for the Pulitzer. Someone (2013) was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The French translation of her most recent novel, The Ninth Hour (2017), received the Prix Femina étranger.

“Moments of crisis [in my writing] were to become a way of exploring and testing character. How we might withstand, or fail to withstand, an extreme experience . . . ”

“You either make a little nation and solve its historical and personnel problems within the format of your own household . . . and you win that one, or you lose the only war worth fighting.”

“It was a great time to be young and restless in New York. I wasn’t getting much writing done, but I like to think I witnessed a great moment and I internalized it.”

“With nonfiction, you’ve got your material, and what you’re trying to do is tell it as a story in a way that doesn’t violate fact, but at the same time is structured and presented in a way that makes it interesting to read.”

“In the navy, when we were flying, instead of saying, ‘Take care of yourself,’ people would say, ‘Don't crash and burn.’ I don't know how funny it was, but we thought it was hilarious.”

“I like . . . those pockets of genuine strangeness within nations. Yet those are being emptied, turned inside out, made to conform—in the interest of what?”

“[As a child] I was so fascinated by these watercolors in a book about Indians that I began teaching myself to read the captions . . . So I associate learning to read English . . . with wanting to know about Indians. I'm still growing into it.

“I believe in saying the truth, coming out with it cold, shocking if necessary, not disguising it. In other words, obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.”

“In the Greek audience, fourteen thousand people sat down at the same time, to see a play … And nobody can tell me that those people were all readers of the New York Review of Books!”

On his writing process:
“Occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm.”

“A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that's it.”

“Is there such a thing as overreading? Just because it wasn’t part of my grand design doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Things do happen in books that the writer is too submersed in bringing the narrative to life to notice.”

“It’s best to recognize that you’re not going to write many brilliant poems. If just one stands the test of time, that’s something that justifies your existence.”

“It’s important for me to have someone read the work who won’t let me get away with things. A bullshit detector. Essential to the process.”

“A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.”

“I think the most difficult thing for me is to be satisfactorily lucid, yet have enough implication in the writing to suit myself.”

“A writer survives in spite of his beliefs. Lawrence will be read whatever one thinks of his notions on sex. Dante is read in the Soviet Union.”

“My guess would be that our folly lies not in what threatens us, or even what eludes us, but in our inability to adapt to it.”

“[Imperialism] allowed people to break away from shackling old traditions and heritages. It introduced the world to fresh ideas and new opportunities. These are the contributions that matter for the redemption and the unity of us all.”

On female friendships:
“Hating, fighting one another, and joining men in their condemnation of ourselves [is] a typical example of what dominated people do.”

“Nothing equips you more for a life in letters than a career in the divorce court.”

“All my editors have been white.”

“I’m pretty interested in general knowledge, and science and arcane knowledge. Much more interested in that than I am in Literature with a capital L. Or at least as interested.”

“Language is so different from life. How am I supposed to fit the one into the other? How can I bring them together?”

“Any story that’s going to be any good is usually going to change.”

“Even now, my ideal for writing fiction is to put Dostoyevsky and Chandler together in one book.”

“You can’t write a traditional novel without giving your characters moral problems and judgments.”

“It’s a deep dirty secret, in Australia, that I’m the wrong class to be a poet.”

“People loved to talk about how Frank O’Hara didn’t really care about getting published. That doesn’t jibe with my experience.”

“I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the air of the western states, are my links with Asiatic and Arctic Russia.”

“Something in late life I have come to understand [is the connection between] hysteria and the sense of the absurd.”

“My house has been burned; I have been detained more than once; I have been exiled; they have declared me incommunicado . . . Very well then. I'm not comfortable with what I have.”

“Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”

“I write plays that are architecturally sound but packed with unexpected things.”

“This is a hard thing to say, but it’s absolutely true—when I think of the men I’ve been with, every one of them stood between me and my writing.”

“I have beliefs, of course, like everyone—but I don't always believe in them.”

“I’ve cultivated the first-person style as opposed to the third person. It’s a problem. A really good novelist is able to write in the third person, but I have never been able to write well in the third person.”

“I think it shows in the poems that the author didn’t ask ­permission of the parents to publish them.” 

“I've been very lucky, very lucky. I'm sorry, but I was born with a towel on my head.”

“If you write in a troubled part of the world, everything is interpreted allegorically.”

“To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination.”

“The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays from a new, strenuous, unpleasant school and finding
oneself back in wholly familiar surroundings. . . .”

“Any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions.”

“I still maintain that living with somebody you know him as well as he can be known. What happens if you’re torturing him or he’s dying of cancer is no business of mine and that is not the individual.”