Quote

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

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Dana Spiotta
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: January 16
Author
Novelist
New Jersey
United States
Must
Invisible
Great
Although
Something
Service
Ideally
Goes
Restaurant
Food
Include
Alone
Restaurants
Wrong
Achieved
Experience
Notice

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Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
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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.
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I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
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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.
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The writer has to be brave, I think.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
Dana Spiotta