Top 100 Mcdermott's Quotes
#1. Jason McDermott's political career, however bogus, appears to have had an early and promising start.
Bill Dedman
#2. I am trying to cultivate the notion that constantly misplacing one's cell phone is a charming eccentricity ... my children aren't buying it.
Alice McDermott
#3. You never want to have a movie be derivative, because that's the worst if you ask me. I always want to be in original material, or an original idea, or an original vision, rather than a rehash of some other movie.
Dylan McDermott
#4. It's hard to find success and it's hard to find hit movies or hit TV shows and to stay relevant. I think it's a very difficult thing for actors, because a lot of us get lost, frankly.
Dylan McDermott
#5. I always felt like I needed to act. Not that I wanted to act, but I needed to. And I still feel that same way. There's an expression that I get to have in acting that I can't consciously express in my life. It has always defined me and it always will.
Dylan McDermott
#6. I said might. But that's a pretty small might. Tiny.
Andy McDermott
#7. What interests me is whatever it is that allows the heart to continue to yearn for something the intelligence knows is impossible to have: a lost love, a shelter from life's blows, the return of a time past, even a connection to the dead.
Alice McDermott
#8. I'm sorry this happened to you, Marie,' he said wearily. 'There's a lot of cruelty in the world.' And then he waved his hat to indicate the paths through the park and all the people on them. 'You'll be lucky if this is your worst taste of it.
Alice McDermott
#9. 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
#11. 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
#12. Jake. From Philadelphia." Then he shook everybody's hand, like he was joining a poker game. Another Jacob. Michael turned to his brother whose eyes
Alice McDermott
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. I think place and time for me is often a matter of convenience, something I can use to another end rather than something I'm trying to define because it's somehow fascinating to me in itself. It's more what the place can do for the larger goals I have for the work.
Alice McDermott
#16. 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
#17. And then I saw him waving to us from behind the sky's reflection.
Alice McDermott
#18. Most of the time people are aiming so low on television. They're trying to reach that common denominator, especially on network television.
Dylan McDermott
#19. Do you know the secret of my success, Alamiri? It is not that I am a great warrior, or that I am cunning or strong - though all those things are true. The secret of my success is that I am bold enough to do what nobody else dares.
Shannon McDermott
#20. I'm interested in characters who should know better, who know they should give up, move on, accept life as it is, with all its constraints - life, death, time - but don't.
Alice McDermott
#21. What you focus on expands. Focus on what you are best at and you will be unstoppable.
Bill McDermott
#22. You'd see those movie stars on the screen, and say, 'I want to be that guy.'
Dylan McDermott
#24. It is better to paint for one minute a day than to think about it for 24 hours a day ...
Andrew McDermott
#25. Memory is not pure. Memories told are not pure memories; memories told are stories. The storyteller will change them. I've always been interested in that.
Alice McDermott
#26. Mr. Persichetti called his patients God's mistakes. He pressed
Alice McDermott
#27. 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
#28. People behave badly and people are in prison and people are on death row, and there are no excuses for everybody's behavior, but most people are coming from abuse.
Dylan McDermott
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. I don't believe in an 'all-about-me' culture. It's about the group.
Brian McDermott
#32. It's the cable shows that are really the most interesting - 'Mad Men,' 'Breaking Bad,' those shows are really the premiere shows on television right now.
Dylan McDermott
#33. Character is primary. What happens as far as plot and events is not as intriguing to me as what's happening inside this particular person.
Alice McDermott
#34. A perfect poem you can't pin down and say, 'This is exactly what it meant to me.' It's not a self-help manual.
Alice McDermott
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. It's like, no matter what I do, I always feel like I'm five years old, and I end up in the back of my father's car looking out the window, and nothing has changed in 25 years.
Dylan McDermott
#38. 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
#39. It's sometimes more torment for a man, Mr. Fagin said, to consider what might have been than to live with what is.
Alice McDermott
#40. "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
#41. When I'm playing a serial killer, I'm in it. I'm not judging him. I'm not judging his environment. I'm just looking for the why. Why is he the way he is? But, there's no doubt that, if you're a good actor, you're going to take this stuff home with you.
Dylan McDermott
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. I think it's handy for a dramatist of any sort, if I can call myself that, to make use of weddings and wakes, to make use of those moments and those rituals that cause us to pause and look back or look forward and understand that life has changed.
Alice McDermott
#46. 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
#47. To me Polanski is one of the greats in terms of psychological horror. It's just hard to top him because he's so damn good at it.
Dylan McDermott
#48. 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
#49. I think it's a trial balloon to see what happens, and I'm not impressed with it.
Jim McDermott
#50. There's nothing wrong with the free-enterprise system. But it has to have some compassion.
Jim McDermott
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. After a long run of almost thirty years, you get to the point where you say, 'These are my concerns.' It's not so much this is what I set out to claim - it is a kind of refrain.
Alice McDermott
#54. I think a misconception among many non-religious people is that anyone with a strong faith is, in all ways and at all times, blindly consistent, unwavering, unquestioning.
Alice McDermott
#55. I'm writing all the time. I tend to work on at least two books simultaneously. I'll spend time with one, and then I'll spend time with the other. Finishing takes whatever time it takes.
Alice McDermott
#56. New York had a big influence on me growing up, and I was really part of the club scene - the Mudd Club and Studio 54. When you're living in New York, you are just bombarded with style, trying to figure out how to be cool and how to feel relaxed at the same time.
Dylan McDermott
#57. Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark ... your words come out, and then nothing ... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.
Alice McDermott
#59. Yeah, romantic comedies are the hardest movies to make. Maybe one works a year.
Dylan McDermott
#60. Then he noticed her boys. They were standing side by side at the edge of the driveway, their plastic guns still in their hands and their faces pale and forlorn beneath the toy helmets, his own Tony, God bless him, with a comforting arm around each.
Alice McDermott
#61. 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
#62. My wife always knows exactly," he said. There was a bit of tobacco on his wet lip. "But that's probably because she only lets me do it twice a year, Valentine's and my birthday, so it's not hard to figure." He stepped out the door and then turned to say, "I got two kids born in
Alice McDermott
#63. I did a movie with Clint Eastwood and I knew I wasn't going to be able to 'out-man' him.
Dylan McDermott
#64. He could not make conversations with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life.
Alice McDermott
#65. It might have been the first time in my life I understood what an easy bond it was, to share a neighborhood as we had done, to share a time past.
Alice McDermott
#66. 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
#67. You treat people with dignity and respect and they give it right back to you.
Bill McDermott
#68. You ask me to make a promise? I am in a cage. No promise I make is trustworthy because I would do anything to be rid of this cage. Promise me that you will not treat me like an animal or a spectacle, and I will see what I can do.
J.M. McDermott
#69. You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once.
Mike McDermott
#70. I'm not giving the president a blank check, period.
Jim McDermott
#71. 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
#72. I've tried like hell to make bad movies good, and I can't. Maybe Marlon Brando has been able to do that at times. But even he has a hard time making 'The Appaloosa' a good movie.
Dylan McDermott
#73. I'm always trying to pop up in different genres, what interests me. Sometimes I just like to throw myself into new situations to see what it feel like.
Dylan McDermott
#75. There was tremendous affection in Billy's eyes, or at least they held a tremendous offer of affection, a tremendous willingness to find whomever he was talking to bright and witty and better than most
Alice McDermott
#76. 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
#77. For me, having characters who are part of a faith then allows me to talk about how that faith either works or fails them without having to attack the institution.
Alice McDermott
#78. Michael had slipped beyond the crest of the dune. Jacob was lying flat out now, on his stomach, his little men all before him, and Annie had followed her single soldier up the dune to a grassy patch where the wind whipped her dark hair and the blowing sand made her squint, even
Alice McDermott
#79. My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well.
Alice McDermott
#80. I think the wilderness is where things happen and no one writes about them. It is the place where there are no maps, no memorials to heroes, no gravestones, no paper and no ink.
J.M. McDermott
#81. Painting is like romance, since it is all about seeing, feeling, and interpreting.
Andrew McDermott
#82. A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later.
Alice McDermott
#83. This was, I thought, the language of shy men, men too much alone with their reading and their ideas - politics, war, distant countries, tyrants. Men who would bury their heads in such stuff just to avert their eyes from a woman's simple heartache.
Alice McDermott
#84. When Rose McDermott, a professor of political science at Brown University, got divorced two years ago, she noticed that a cluster of her friends were splitting up at around the same time.
Katie Hafner
#85. In the act of reading, especially reading fiction, where a world is being created, all kinds of matters of belief come into play.
Alice McDermott
#87. 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
#88. I do have friends in Pittsburgh, and I had some wonderful experiences there.
Alice McDermott
#89. With the rise of cable, network is clearly floundering because the characters on cable are far more fascinating than they are on network. Network television is trying to figure it out. Network television really relies on story rather than character, and cable relies on character.
Dylan McDermott
#90. The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Alice McDermott
#91. I really am a character actor, in my heart of hearts, because I really do like developing characters and painting a past for them.
Dylan McDermott
#92. We pretended there was no problem with Agent Orange after Vietnam and later the Pentagon recanted, after untold suffering by veterans.
Jim McDermott
#93. 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
#94. Thousands more were being born today, being conceived - women with their knees raised all over the world. Mrs.
Alice McDermott
#95. If you start a painting and you don't like where it's going, don't give up on it. Just keep going and follow through. You might be surprised how it ends up.
Andrew McDermott
#96. The owner's wife gave me a container of chicken soup and a quart of rice pudding to take home. She was a broad, solid woman with thick arms and legs. She swiped vigorously at the stain on my coat with a wad of dampened paper towel, and I remembered Pegeen then: There's always someone nice.
Alice McDermott
#98. You can make people do anything if they're afraid.
Jim McDermott
#99. In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have ... But I never did write a play.
Alice McDermott
#100. 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
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