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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

Alice Mattison

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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
General
Truly
Past
America
Better
Things

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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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.
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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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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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
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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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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
Alice Mattison
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The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
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 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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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 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
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We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
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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Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
Alice Mattison
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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.
Alice Mattison
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I just like doing it, I like writing.
Alice Mattison
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Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.
Alice Mattison
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Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
Alice Mattison
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I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.
Alice Mattison
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
Alice Mattison