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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
Instrument
Live
Trying
Fundamental

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Those memories that are engraved within me become teaching tools, ways of connecting with others, of creating an empathic bridge, of reaching out a hand and saying, I've been there, too.
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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.
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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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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.
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My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
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We are tyrannized by our options.
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You can start your day over anytime.
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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.
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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.
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I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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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.
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If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.
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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.
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Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.
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Success is so fleeting, even if you get a good book deal or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: What about the next one?
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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
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