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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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Dana Spiotta
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: January 16
Author
Novelist
New Jersey
United States
Forbidden
Chances
Meaningful
Complicated
Chance
Tell
Complications
Complication
Unthinkable

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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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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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 am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
Dana Spiotta
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I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
Dana Spiotta
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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
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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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I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
Dana Spiotta
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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.
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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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
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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.
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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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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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
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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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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
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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
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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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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