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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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Dana Spiotta
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: January 16
Author
Novelist
New Jersey
United States
Family
Kids
Book
Mean
Like
Aunt
Guess
Books
Call
More quotes by Dana Spiotta
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
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
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
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
Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
Dana Spiotta
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
I don't have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that I can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.
Dana Spiotta
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
I take the outline from a real person as inspiration, but the in-line is totally made up. Which is why I usually invent imaginary names.
Dana Spiotta
My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.
Dana Spiotta
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
Dana Spiotta
I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
Dana Spiotta
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
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
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
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
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
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
I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.
Dana Spiotta
Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.
Dana Spiotta
