Alice McDermott : (3)

" I believed in fictional characters as if they were a part of real life. Poetry was important, too. My parents had memorized poems from their days attending school in New York City and loved reciting them. We all enjoyed listening to these poems and to music as well. " - Alice McDermott

" Our task as fiction writers isn’t just to report something that didn’t really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language. " - Alice McDermott

" My parents were both first-generation Irish Catholics raised in Brooklyn. " - Alice McDermott