Quote

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

Dana Spiotta

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Dana Spiotta
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: January 16
Author
Novelist
New Jersey
United States
Doesn
Issue
Matter
Matters
Need
Choice
Enough
Issues
Needs
Choices
Thing
Ability
Good
Desire
Inspirational

More quotes by Dana Spiotta

Image
I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.
Dana Spiotta
Image
All roads lead to Wall Street, but we feel the effects of Wall Street on every street corner. Certainly in Syracuse, N.Y., where I live.
Dana Spiotta
Image
Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
Dana Spiotta
Image
I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
Dana Spiotta
Image
I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
Dana Spiotta
Image
In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.
Dana Spiotta
Image
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
Dana Spiotta
Image
Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
Dana Spiotta
Image
Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
Dana Spiotta
Image
My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.
Dana Spiotta
Image
Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.
Dana Spiotta
Image
I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.
Dana Spiotta
Image
I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.
Dana Spiotta
Image
For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places.
Dana Spiotta
Image
My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.
Dana Spiotta
Image
The idea that you can live off the grid and just do your own thing is a very American idea - that you should be able to do your own thing, if you want to, if you're willing to pay the price for it. I think the price has gotten higher and higher.
Dana Spiotta
Image
I find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization.
Dana Spiotta
Image
Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.
Dana Spiotta
Image
Although a great restaurant experience must include great food, a bad restaurant experience can be achieved through bad service alone. Ideally, service is invisible. You notice it only when something goes wrong.
Dana Spiotta
Image
I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.
Dana Spiotta