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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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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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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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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 actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
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I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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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.
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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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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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Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
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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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Little children are all writers.
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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 think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in 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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The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
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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 love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
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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.
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