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It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

Alice Mattison

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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Always
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Fiction
Views
Point
Someone
Different
Writing
Scary
Thing
Writers

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
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I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
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I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
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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.
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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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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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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'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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I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.
Alice Mattison
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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
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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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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
Alice Mattison
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I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
Alice Mattison
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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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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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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 don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
Alice Mattison
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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.
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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