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I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.

Alice Mattison

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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Think
Thinking
Freaks
Loose
Freak
Easier
Control
Actually
Sometimes

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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
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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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We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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 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.
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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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I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
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It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
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Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
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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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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.
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You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.
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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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