Quote

I don't have the courage not to write all the time.

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
Courage
Write
Writing
Time

More quotes by 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
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
Image
I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
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
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
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 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
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
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 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
Little children are all writers.
Alice Mattison
Image
I just like doing it, I like writing.
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
Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
Alice Mattison
Image
I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
Alice Mattison
Image
I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
Alice Mattison
Image
I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
Alice Mattison