Quote

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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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Sometimes
Writer
Great
Style
Something
Quite
Way
Seen
Chronology
Talk
Varying
Turns
Indirect
Woman
Worried
Often
Gets

More quotes by 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.
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I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
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Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
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We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
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I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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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.
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Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.
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You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.
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Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
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There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.
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Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.
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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
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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.
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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
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I think you have to remember that writing is hard my first editor used to say that to me.
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
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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.
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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.
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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