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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Write
Everything
Writing
Life
Daily
Sitting
Learned
Practice

More quotes by Dani Shapiro

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There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.
Dani Shapiro
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I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.
Dani Shapiro
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My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
Dani Shapiro
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It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.
Dani Shapiro
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I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.
Dani Shapiro
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Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.
Dani Shapiro
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I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi. What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.
Dani Shapiro
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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
Dani Shapiro
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As a fiction writer, that's been a preoccupation of mine: Can you really just close the door and leave the past back there behind you, or is the door going to blow open at some point?
Dani Shapiro
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Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
Dani Shapiro
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Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.
Dani Shapiro
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You can start your day over anytime.
Dani Shapiro
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If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art
Dani Shapiro
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At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.
Dani Shapiro
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If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.
Dani Shapiro
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Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
Dani Shapiro
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If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen - I may just miss my life.
Dani Shapiro
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I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they're telling me to say, You know you can't write about this.
Dani Shapiro
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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
Dani Shapiro
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When a writer's whole being is poured into a piece of work, there is never enough. The feeling of finally getting to the end of a piece of work, of making it as good as you can at that moment, is more of a relief than anything else, and then you wait for reviews.
Dani Shapiro