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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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Kind
Fundamentals
Something
Instruments
Way
Writer
Make
Artist
Think
Art
Thinking
Change
Live
Instrument
Trying
Fundamental

More quotes by Dani Shapiro

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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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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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There is no end to the promotion. There is no end to the possibilities. You can continue to promote a book for years, literally.
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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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.
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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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When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.
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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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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There's something about urban life - you walk out your door, and you're in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it's very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.
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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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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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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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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I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track.
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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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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What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.
Dani Shapiro
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You can start your day over anytime.
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