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There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
Alice Mattison
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Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
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Many
Legal
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More quotes by Alice Mattison
Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
Alice Mattison
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
Alice Mattison
The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
Alice Mattison
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
I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
Alice Mattison
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
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
When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
Alice Mattison
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
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
There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
Alice Mattison
I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
Alice Mattison
I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
Alice Mattison
I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
Alice Mattison
The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
Alice Mattison
Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
Alice Mattison
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
Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
Alice Mattison
I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
Alice Mattison
Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
Alice Mattison
