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In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Home
Examine
Matter
Closest
Runs
Essential
Essentials
Journey
Creative
Running

More quotes by 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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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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My journals were a clearing house - a garbage can. Once I was writing seriously, I understood that this was the stuff that didn't belong in my work.
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 was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.
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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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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Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories
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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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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I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.
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
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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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I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
Dani Shapiro
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If there's anything weirder than an introverted writer going to lots of social functions, it's an introverted writer being converted into an accidental guru.
Dani Shapiro
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I was in my early thirties writing about my early twenties, so there was this way of seeing my younger self from enough of a distance to have perspective but also not to feel that I had to protect myself. My dreams for myself then would have undersold myself in a way.
Dani Shapiro
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When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me.
Dani Shapiro
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You can start your day over anytime.
Dani Shapiro
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Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.
Dani Shapiro
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Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.
Dani Shapiro