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You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.

Alice Mattison

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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Tell
Confident
Writer

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.
Alice Mattison
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I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
Alice Mattison
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Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.
Alice Mattison
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I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
Alice Mattison
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There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
Alice Mattison
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Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.
Alice Mattison
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
Alice Mattison
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I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
Alice Mattison
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Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
Alice Mattison
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Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.
Alice Mattison
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When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
Alice Mattison
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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
Alice Mattison
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I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.
Alice Mattison
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I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.
Alice Mattison
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We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
Alice Mattison
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There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
Alice Mattison
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Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
Alice Mattison
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I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.
Alice Mattison
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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
Alice Mattison
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In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
Alice Mattison