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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
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Dana Spiotta
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: January 16
Author
Novelist
New Jersey
United States
Way
Accurate
Filmmaker
Ways
Portrait
Persons
Documentary
Person
Documentaries
Many
Portraits
Even
Shaped
Trying
Tries
More quotes by 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
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
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
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
Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.
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 am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
Dana Spiotta
Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
Dana Spiotta
I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
Dana Spiotta
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
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
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
Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
Dana Spiotta
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
