American - Author | April 10, 1962 -
Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.
Dani Shapiro
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When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I'm feeling.
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I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.
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The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.
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Our pain hides beneath these fluttering, random thoughts that run through our heads in an endless loop. But there's so much freedom in getting to know what's under there, the bedrock.
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Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?'
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I love living in the country, so much so that I'm even surprised by it. I have met lots of interesting people - the community was really welcoming, and I now probably have a more interesting social life than I did in the city.
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Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.
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Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
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I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.
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I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.
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My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.
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