Mcdermott Quotes & Sayings

And then the thrashing of the wind against the house and then what might have been a volley of pistol shots, and then a sound like something slowly spilling from a great height. Jacob pulled his knees up into his arms and whimpered. Annie, dramatically, put her arms around her father's neck. "There went the tree," he said. — Alice McDermott

I don't want to write about violence, and I don't want to hang a plot on a murder. I think it's cheap. — Alice McDermott

I was one of those kids who always wrote. — Alice McDermott

You treat people with dignity and respect and they give it right back to you. — Bill McDermott

If one of these, if a hundred of them, a thousand, came too soon or failed to thrive or were born incomplete somehow, born blue or ill made or with reason's taut string already snapped, it was of little matter in the long history of God's bustling. There — Alice McDermott

My dad was kind of a pool shark and had a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin thing going on. I've always been fascinated by the fifties because of him. There was a hip, cool, anything-goes atmosphere back then, but looking good was still a priority. — Dylan McDermott

We are at the mercy of time, and for all the ways we are remembered, a sea of things will be lost. But how much is contained in what lingers! — Alice McDermott

As much as they deny it, I think people want to be scared. It's a phenomenon, why people want to be scared when there is so much violence and craziness in the world. People still really enjoy being scared. It's a conundrum to me. It's hard to explain. It's an unconscious thing, really, why people like that so much. — Dylan McDermott

'Dark Blue' is ultimately a gritty crime drama, at its core. I don't think that is ever going to change. — Dylan McDermott

How can I tell McDermott that this is a very disjointed time of my life and that I notice the walls have been painted a bright, almost painful white and under the glare of the fluorescent lights they seem to pulse and glow. — Bret Easton Ellis

It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again. — Alice McDermott

Pauline had restored order after the ordeal of the birth. She had swallowed her revulsion - what a mess it had made - restored order, made things right for the homecoming. — Alice McDermott

Nowadays you really have to pump out that blockbuster in order to have the luxury of getting a body of work, and that's sad because the work suffers. Today everything is based on money. The older actors, they inspire me. — Dylan McDermott

I love music, from shanty sea-songs to Calvin Harris. — Brian McDermott

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things. — Alice McDermott

Any fiction writer who assumes that a character is typical no doubt runs the risk of stumbling into cliche and stereotype. — Alice McDermott

Let's note, that in what I consider the most disgraceful performance abroad by an American official in my lifetime - something not exampled since Jane Fonda sat on the anti-aircraft gun in Hanoi to be photographed - Mr. McDermott said in effect, not in effect, he said it, we should take Saddam Hussein at his word and not take the President at his word. He said the United States is simply trying to provoke. I mean, why Saddam Hussein doesn't pay commercial time for that advertisement for his policy, I do not know. — George Will

I read a little bit of nonfiction and a lot of poetry. I think of poetry as my shot of whiskey when I don't have time to savor a whole bottle of wine. — Alice McDermott

Her husband was asleep beside her. She could — Alice McDermott

He folded back the hem of her housedress. Peeled the wet underpants from her skin and moved them down over her pale knees and her small feet and then dropped them on the floor. He could hear the voices of the children playing in the tree outside. He gently pushed her thighs apart and saw immediately that the baby had already begun to crown. Her skin was paler than his wife's was, even in midwinter. He gave her his hand to get her through the next contraction, keeping his arm steady as she squeezed. He spread the fingers of the other over her taut belly. Mr. Persichetti wore a silver Saint Christopher's medal around his neck and kept a Sacred Heart scapular in his pocket, but when Mary Keane asked him, catching her breath, "Who's the patron saint of women in labor?" he shrugged. He told her he only knew Saint Dymphna was the patron of the insane. He'd had the — Alice McDermott

Most actors are starving. Most of us are walking around with a flashlight and tweezers looking for evidence. When you have someone that actually writes an acting role, it's rare. — Dylan McDermott

I mean, I always think when you're an actor you have to be the guy running into the burning building rather than running out of it, if you want to make some noise as an actor. — Dylan McDermott

As a writer, you have to put yourself in service to the character, get behind their eyes by delineating the world where the character develops. You have to listen to the character and see him inside his certain world to know what conclusions he would draw. — Alice McDermott

The wind was just above them. It seemed to skim the tops of the surrounding dunes, bending the grass. But here the sun on his knees and on his forearm felt warm. — Alice McDermott

I have stood on the front lines of the health care system as a doctor, patient and concerned parent. Those experiences have served as my guideposts throughout the struggle to reform America's health care system. And it's those same experiences that tell me that fear and election hysteria should not overshadow the reality of reform. — Jim McDermott

He said I was trapped. He had trapped me. I told him to carefully consider what trapped animals do when they do not wish to be trapped. — J.M. McDermott

I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there. — Alice McDermott

When I'm not writing, I can't make sense of out anything. I feel the need to make some sense and find some order, and writing fiction is the only way I've found that seems to begin to do that. — Alice McDermott

Right away I think of two books - 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Rebecca' - and of just sinking into them as a young reader. I think they must have appealed not just to my romantic adolescent soul, but I suppose there's also an appealing darkness in both of them. — Alice McDermott

Language is the writer's only tool - we really don't have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world. — Alice McDermott

I learned really early on that I had to treat it as if it were a real job. This might be my middle class background - the Irish work ethic, which isn't quite the same as the Protestant work ethic - but still, it's, 'Get a job and show up every day. Be there. And don't complain. Who do you think you are: you're nobody special; go to work.' — Alice McDermott

When have I rebelled?"
"When have you ever obeyed? — Shannon McDermott

I love a well-plotted story. But I'm just not that kind of writer, and it's not necessarily by choice. When I manipulate plot, I feel I lose authenticity. — Alice McDermott

"Someone": I understood that this was a character who in her own life her voice hadn't much been heard and in literature her life isn't much heard. For me, it was resisting all the more appealing characters and listening to the voice that hadn't been much heard from. — Alice McDermott

Unlike the men her brothers preferred, this one had no rifle pressed to its shoulder, no hand grenade about to be thrown, but stood instead with his arms extended from his sides, palms out. His head was slightly raised, as if whatever he confronted was still at some distance, and was larger than just another man. His name was Steve. Steve Stevens. And he was a scout, sent ahead. Alone. She moved him through the sand, up over the boulders and hills that were the arms and legs of the bear. John Keane, leaning over his knees, watched the — Alice McDermott

Mr. Persichetti called his patients God's mistakes. He pressed — Alice McDermott

I am not a theologian or a historian, and I feel no call to become a defender of the faith, so in my case, the search for what remains valuable focuses on language itself: Catholic prayer, ritual, the naming of things. — Alice McDermott

Herding them all toward the basement, their father paused at the dining-room window, pulled back the curtain and shone the beam through the window and out into the darkness until it caught the yawning base of the doomed tree. After only a quick glimpse, a glimpse that was like a gulp of foul air, Jacob pulled at his mother's hand to draw her to safety. But Michael lingered, and even Annie squirmed out of her father's arms to stand by the window, her two hands on the painted sill. The roots reared out of the black ground, the trunk leaned and then straightened, the long branches swung this way and that. Their mother patted Jacob's hand to soothe him. On their way through the kitchen she took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator and the remaining paper cups from their picnic. They followed their father's flashlight down the wooden steps. It was a tunnel of light and it seemed to draw — Alice McDermott

Terrible things were ahead of her: Jacob would go to Vietnam. Her father's surgery had made him an old man. And how would she bear the empty world without her mother in it? There was college to look forward to, boyfriends, marriage, maybe children of her own, but terrible things, too, were attached to any future. What you needed, she thought, was Susan's ability, her courage, to fix your eyes on the point at which the worst things would be over, gotten through. — Alice McDermott

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower. — Alice McDermott

I don't like the slasher stuff, myself, but I do like the psychological horror of Roman Polanski and that world. But, it's curious to me why people do like to be afraid. — Dylan McDermott

Any yellow, any blue, any red and a white are all I need. — Andrew McDermott

As an actor, you always have to reinvent yourself or you end up in the gutter somewhere. It's my job to always change people's minds. I've known that for a long time and I've had to do it. — Dylan McDermott

We are surrounded by story. — Alice McDermott

You'll need an awful lot of pixie dust to move 2.5 mil in forty-eight hours, Better let Tinker Bell know you'll need backup. — Matt Leatherwood Jr.

Any adjective you put before the noun 'writer' is going to be limiting in some way. Whether it's feminist writer, Jewish writer, Russian writer, or whatever. — Alice McDermott

Style is innate to who I am. My father gave me a picture the other day. I must have been about seven, and I had on wing-tip shoes and some cool pants. I thought, 'Wow!' — Dylan McDermott

No one looks at a baby and says, 'You are going to be a great novelist, and you really need to start writing now.' Something in us says: 'This is what I must do.' — Alice McDermott

Guilt is glorious when it's well earned. — Alice McDermott

frustration. He stalked off — Andy McDermott

I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase. — Alice McDermott

You'd see those movie stars on the screen, and say, 'I want to be that guy.' — Dylan McDermott

My children have gone to Catholic school ... Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you're only 15 or 16 - thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations. — Alice McDermott

Once more into the breach," he said, turning up his collar. "Wish me luck." For an odd second, she thought he might lean down and kiss her cheek. "Good luck," she said. Over her shoulder, she watched him walk away. A slight limp, a favoring, perhaps, of his left leg. A flaw that would, she knew, diminish him in some women's eyes. Even if he'd been wounded in the war, there would be, she knew, for some women, the diminished appeal of a man who had suffered something over which he'd had no control. Who had suffered disappointment. — Alice McDermott

She had an image of her unborn child, its head up under her heart, its ear pressed to the wall of her flesh, treading water with the flutter of its small legs, listening. It would hear the echo of the waves, the whistle of the wind, the rise and fall of its father's breath as his lips opened and touched closed. Mary Keane was more than certain (she would have — Alice McDermott

Buggeration and Fuckery — Andy McDermott

Amadan." I said it as Pegeen had said it, ruefully, shaking my head as if speaking fondly of a troublesome child. I said it with my chin just above my own china cup and its dregs of melting sugar, with my eyes veering away from my brother's startled face and down into that ivory light. And then, for good measure, I said it again, into the teacup itself. "Amadan." The — Alice McDermott

Loss is inevitable - you have to be blind or naive to think otherwise. — Alice McDermott

It was in its strangeness and in its familiarity an illustration of someone else's life going on in its own way, steeped in itself, its own business, its own dailyness, its own particular sorrow or joy, all of it more or less predictable — Alice McDermott

We pretended there was no problem with Agent Orange after Vietnam and later the Pentagon recanted, after untold suffering by veterans. — Jim McDermott

Jason McDermott's political career, however bogus, appears to have had an early and promising start. — Bill Dedman

Usually the things that kill us are the things we do every single day. — J.M. McDermott

Once you understand that someone has Tourette and that they can't help their tics, it takes away the distraction. And you can engage your compassion. You feel for them. You embrace them. — Dylan McDermott

The writing itself is the thing that generates stories for me. — Alice McDermott

L.A. is still such a fascinating place to me, so big and diverse. It's so spread out that you can go from Zuma to downtown and there's really like 10 different towns in between. — Dylan McDermott

He was pale as salt. Although — Alice McDermott

I learned that every tree fights for sunlight in the canopy, but this happens so slowly that the combat looks like peace. — J.M. McDermott

The servants were evil," he said, recalling the tale the way the whiskey priest they sent to Creedmoor told it, sitting with Mr. Persichetti at the nurses' station late into the night, those watery blue eyes forever bloodshot and sleepless. "They told the crazy chieftain that he should marry his beautiful daughter instead. Which he tried to do." ("If you get my meaning," the priest had said.) "But Dymphna ran off to Belgium." He saw her grimace and purse her lips, her face seemed to swell with color. "Her crazy father followed her," he said, tightening his own grip on her hand. "I guess he cut off her head. — Alice McDermott

Mike Shea became a medic during the war and was now married, working for Pfizer. To this day he can't look at her straight. To this day she can't quite convince herself that the sin was as grave as it seemed. (She thought, in fact, of telling the priest as he whispered his furious admonitions that she weighed barely a hundred pounds and was as thin as a boy and if he would adjust his imagination accordingly and see the buds of her breasts and her flat stomach and the bony points of her hips, he would understand that even buck naked, her body was not made for mortal sin.) She can — Alice McDermott

When Mrs. Keane whispered, between contractions, that the baby was coming at least six weeks too soon, he shook his head and clucked his tongue, lifting the wet dish towel from her forehead and refolding it and then touching it gently to her cheeks. The dampness, and the perspiration, had darkened her hair and the pain had brought some color to her face. There was all about her a not unpleasant odor of oatmeal or wheat. He knelt beside the couch. When he leaned away, his T-shirt was wet with the amniotic fluid that had soaked her dress and the cushion beneath her. Her knees were already raised, her pale legs bare, and he asked, gently, if she would like him to check what was going on. She nodded and when the contraction had passed, added, "Modesty is always the first thing to go. — Alice McDermott

I believe that the interior life is the same for all of us. And because they're steeped in faith, Irish-American Catholics are a people who have a language for the examined life. — Alice McDermott

All my friends had grandparents who had accents. I thought all grandparents were supposed to have accents. My friends were all second-generation, as I was. — Alice McDermott

The world was a cruder, more vulgar place than the one I had known. This was the language required to live in it, I supposed. — Alice McDermott

McDermott and two colleagues - James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas A. Christakis of Harvard University - published a paper titled 'Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too.' Their study shows that divorce can spread like a virus among friends, siblings and co-workers. — Katie Hafner

It was already there," he said. "Someone left it behind. They didn't want it. The super said they couldn't even rent the apartment for a few weeks because it takes up the whole bedroom and nobody wanted to pay to take it out. Can you believe it? A Steinway." "Lucky that you play," she said. She — Alice McDermott

I have a great fondness for the liars in my stories. — Alice McDermott

Thousands more were being born today, being conceived - women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs. — Alice McDermott

when law is isolated and exalted into an independent system of religion, it becomes demonic. — Gerald R. McDermott

A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility. — Alice McDermott

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read. — Alice McDermott

Honestly, I'm cool with everyone, and people pick up on that. I'd say, 'I'm not gay, but it's all good.' It's kind of like going to Paris when you don't know the language; some Americans get into trouble over there, but I'm just like, 'Sorry, I don't speak French.' — Dylan McDermott

Billy didn't need someone to pour him his drinks, he needed someone to tell him that living isn't poetry. It isn't prayer. To tell him and convince him. And none of us could do it because every one of us thought that as long as Billy believed it was, as long as he kept himself believing it, then maybe it could still be true. — Alice McDermott

He could have left out the fact that one had but a few hours to live, while the other had another life entirely still before him. This one. With her arms around her — Alice McDermott

dull - she did not, with equal longing, wish to be a part of the whispering spinster chorus at the edge of other, more interesting lives. She — Alice McDermott

Do you know anything about hearts, Jona? The Senta know hearts. Hearts are not one organ. Inside a mother's womb, two pulsing bags of blood seek their eternal mate."
Her hand reached out to his. She opened his palm, and traced a finger down his lifeline, then his loveline. She lifted it up to her own face. She placed it on her cheek.
"Lungs are fine apart," she said, "Hands do not need another but to clap. Brains gnarl like roots in the nothing of soul, and guts spin in knots around the nothing of hunger. But hearts are made by two complete parts merging together. Once the two pieces sense each other in the blood flow, they cross every bloody cliff inside of us. The arteries bind the halves close. The veins make love to each other in the life pulse that makes all life from love entwined. — J.M. McDermott

'Rosemary's Baby' is still one of my favorite movies of all time. The idea of her being impregnated with the devil is just so frightening. I'm actually going to work on a movie in February, called 'Mercy,' from Jason Blum, who produced the 'Paranormal Activity' movies, and there is a similar theme to 'Rosemary's Baby' in the movie. — Dylan McDermott

The flip side of this is that they will not tolerate criticism and can be scathing of anyone who criticizes them. They will often attack and belittle the person who is being critical, instead of dealing with the points the person is making. They do this usually because they have no defence against the criticism, they have been found out. So it's easier to destroy the reputation of the critical person instead. — David McDermott

Much of my experience with language was formed in the church, which has an oral tradition. There are lots of repetitions in prayers and song refrains. There's a sense of incantation, that if you call not once and not twice but for a third time, the spirit appears. — Alice McDermott

It was not about the sea or the sand, but burying her feet there had seemed to cure what had worried her ... — Alice McDermott

The real Representative McDermott said Jason McDermott is no relation. The Congressman does have a son, but his name is James and he does not live in the Midwest. — Bill Dedman

My past is not pleasant; I grew up in a very tough town, Waterbury, Connecticut. I grew up in New York, too, but Waterbury was tougher. — Dylan McDermott

I like the Polanski stuff more than anything else. Rosemary's Baby is still one of my favorite movies of all time. The idea of her being impregnated with the devil is just so frightening. — Dylan McDermott

It was not the future they'd been objecting to, but the loss of the past. As if it was his fault that you could now have one without the other — Alice McDermott

The language of the Catholic Church - the liturgy, the prayer, the gospels - was in many ways my first poetry. — Alice McDermott

It is better to paint for one minute a day than to think about it for 24 hours a day ... — Andrew McDermott

In the dining room, my brother - the scholar - was asking my father what it meant, amadan. My father said, "A fool. It means someone's a fool." Even with the water running, the cup of soapy water at my lips, I could hear my father's shout of laughter when my brother asked him, "Who is? — Alice McDermott

I was terrified of the Vietnam War when I was 13. I thought I was going. The draft was such an ominous thing, I felt as if it was going to trickle down to me. — Dylan McDermott

Mr. Persichetti was a night nurse at the state hospital, inspired — Alice McDermott

I wouldn't want to tweet to anyone who would be interested in my tweets. — Alice McDermott

If you ask me why I've succeeded, it's because I was in the Royal Marines. You have this unbelievable sense of achievement and of overcoming adversity. That's the confidence it breeds. — Brian McDermott