Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
Alice Mattison
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Alice Mattison
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: March 18
Novelist
New York City
New York
People
Two
Feel
Feels
Writing
Long
Drafts
Time
Novel
Think
Ought
Thinking
Write
More quotes by Alice Mattison
I think you have to remember that writing is hard my first editor used to say that to me.
Alice Mattison
The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
Alice Mattison
I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
Alice Mattison
Little children are all writers.
Alice Mattison
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
Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
Alice Mattison
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
The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
Alice Mattison
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
I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
Alice Mattison
Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
Alice Mattison
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
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
I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
Alice Mattison
You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
Alice Mattison
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
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
Alice Mattison
I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.
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
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
