Quote

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.

Alice Mattison

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Censorship
Around
Think
Thinking
Innate

More quotes by Alice Mattison

Image
Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
Alice Mattison
Image
I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
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.
Alice Mattison
Image
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Alice Mattison
Image
Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
Alice Mattison
Image
Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
Alice Mattison