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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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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Someone
Writing
Experiences
Imagination
Anyone
Write

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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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!
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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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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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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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
Alice Mattison
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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.
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.
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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In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
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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You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
Alice Mattison
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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.
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 is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.
Alice Mattison
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I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
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 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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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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When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.
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