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I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.

Alix Kates Shulman

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Alix Kates Shulman
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: August 17
Novelist
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Cleveland
Ohio
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Psychological
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More quotes by Alix Kates Shulman

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People often say to me now, Your work changed my life. I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.
Alix Kates Shulman
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There is still nothing like equality for women in jobs, in family. There's just an awareness that inequality is not acceptable.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Solitude offers a lot that being coupled or being in a group does not. It helps us learn what we are capable of.
Alix Kates Shulman
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I am a feminist. I'm trying to show the relationships between men and women, always the structural relations, not individual villains. I'd never make a husband a villain. I try very hard in my work not to - because if I made one man a villain, the rest would be off the hook. I'm interested in the system of oppression.
Alix Kates Shulman
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The world is abundant with food for us, and with everything we need, if only we just open our eyes. There's so much food that gets thrown out or never harvested.
Alix Kates Shulman
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I see old age not as something to hide from or dread (though there is much to oppose in the usual treatment of the old) but rather as something to embrace as the natural and inevitable end.
Alix Kates Shulman
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For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey.
Alix Kates Shulman
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One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable.
Alix Kates Shulman
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When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.
Alix Kates Shulman
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In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Being alone for a woman is probably much more scary than for a man. I'm all for getting over our fears by facing them head-on.
Alix Kates Shulman
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It's always difficult to write honestly of one's deepest feelings, particularly without the protective veil of fiction. But the more difficult, the more rewarding if one succeeds. Rewarding not only to the work but to one's peace of mind.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Ever since Freud, being alone has been considered something of a psychological failure. The point, according to Freudian theory, is to be able to love and connect. But I don't believe that at all. I think that being alone and being coupled and being in a group are all natural states in which people can thrive.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Everything is connected. There is no such thing as an island, especially in our world, global village, the whole thing. Pollution from way across the ocean circulates in the air.
Alix Kates Shulman
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As I experienced life on the island, without electricity, plumbing or telephone, I thought it was important to show that people can live as I did without dying or falling apart. I wanted people to understand that we don't need everything that our culture tells us we have to have to be satisfied.
Alix Kates Shulman
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When I became a feminist, when the movement started in the late sixties, I started writing because I had something urgent to say. My first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, is the product of that urgency.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Many people spend the ends of their lives alone, and probably a lot of years in the middle of their lives, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to experience the rewards of solitude.
Alix Kates Shulman
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For many decades my relations with my parents constituted unfinished business. I had dealt with them through sheer avoidance and guilt.
Alix Kates Shulman
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Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.
Alix Kates Shulman