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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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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Someone
Take
Message
Right
Burden
Writing
Messages
Kind
Difference
Think
Differences
Thinking
Write
Political

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
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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We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
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.
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Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
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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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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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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
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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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
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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You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
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'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.
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.
Alice Mattison
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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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Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
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 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.
Alice Mattison
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Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.
Alice Mattison