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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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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Years
Novel
People
Write
Two
Best
Might
Take
Whole
Revise
Writing
Secretive

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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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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Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
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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.
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When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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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.
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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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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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Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
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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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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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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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In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
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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.
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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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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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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You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
Alice Mattison
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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.
Alice Mattison