Quote

Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.

Dana Spiotta

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Dana Spiotta
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: January 16
Author
Novelist
New Jersey
United States
Getting
Costs
Artist
Requires
Wells
Luck
Well
Artists
Much
Private
Cost
Talent
Audience
Shy

More quotes by Dana Spiotta

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It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
Dana Spiotta
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Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.
Dana Spiotta
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I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
Dana Spiotta
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I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.
Dana Spiotta
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Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
Dana Spiotta
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A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.
Dana Spiotta
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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
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When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.
Dana Spiotta
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There's lots of things that can't make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of great writers who don't get published - is it still worthwhile? Aren't we glad people are still doing it?
Dana Spiotta
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Tell me it's forbidden, unthinkable, and that's where I want to go. Because the chances are it's complicated, and the complications are meaningful.
Dana Spiotta
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The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.
Dana Spiotta
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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
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If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.
Dana Spiotta
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I don't feel sentimental about the past, but I can't help noticing how hard it has become to keep a grip on anything. Maybe it's the totalizing impact of corporate culture, maybe it's the atomizing impact of technology.
Dana Spiotta
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I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
Dana Spiotta
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My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.
Dana Spiotta
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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
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I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.
Dana Spiotta
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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
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Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.
Dana Spiotta