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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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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
Need
Needs
Hurdle
Jump
Excited
Students
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More quotes by Alice Mattison

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You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.
Alice Mattison
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I just like doing it, I like writing.
Alice Mattison
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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.
Alice Mattison
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I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
Alice Mattison
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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
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I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.
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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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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When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
Alice Mattison
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We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
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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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
Alice Mattison
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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.
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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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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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.
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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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 heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!
Alice Mattison
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
Alice Mattison