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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
Way
States
Persons
Person
Many
Legal
Different
Helpful
Writing
Ways
Going
Possible
Mind
State

More quotes by Alice Mattison

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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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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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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
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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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I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
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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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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 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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I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
Alice Mattison
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I think you have to remember that writing is hard my first editor used to say that to me.
Alice Mattison
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I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
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 just like doing it, I like writing.
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.
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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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Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.
Alice Mattison
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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.
Alice Mattison
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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.
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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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
Alice Mattison