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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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Able
Powers
Thus
Distance
Characters
Turn
Turns
Stories
Fashioning
Character
Observation

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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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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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.
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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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Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories
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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.
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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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The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.
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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?
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I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.
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Courage is more important than confidence
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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.
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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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Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.
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