Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

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
Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
Alice Mattison
Image
I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
Alice Mattison
Image
Little children are all writers.
Alice Mattison
Image
Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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
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
I think you have to remember that writing is hard my first editor used to say that to me.
Alice Mattison
Image
In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
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
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 I write well when I'm very upset.
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
The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
Alice Mattison
Image
I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
Image
I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
Alice Mattison
Image
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
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
There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
Alice Mattison