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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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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Writing
Whipped
Think
Imprisoned
Thinking
Cultures
People
Killed
Culture
Stills
Still
Many

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I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
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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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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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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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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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You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
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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 a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.
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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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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.
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I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
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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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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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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
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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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You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.
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Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
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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.
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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