Quote

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

Alice Mattison

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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Done
Couple
Real
Becomes
Imagining
Stand
Details
Probably
Shoes
Open
Across
House
Door
Order
Clothes
Character
Doors

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
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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.
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
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I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!
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Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
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Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.
Alice Mattison
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We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
Alice Mattison
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I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.
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I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
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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.
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I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
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Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
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I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
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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.
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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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Little children are all writers.
Alice Mattison
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Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
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.
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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