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
Experience
Notice
Must
Invisible
Great
Although
Something
Service
Ideally
Goes
Restaurant
Food
Include
Alone
Restaurants
Wrong
Achieved

More quotes by Dana Spiotta

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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.
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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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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.
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Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
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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 want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
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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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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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The writer has to be brave, I think.
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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 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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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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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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It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
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