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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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Theme
Novel
Started
Running
Obsessing
Really
Haunting
Life
Themes
Realising
Novels

More quotes by Dani Shapiro

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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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You can start your day over anytime.
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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.
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Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.
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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.
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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.
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We are tyrannized by our options.
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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 could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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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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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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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
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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?
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.
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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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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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Courage is more important than confidence
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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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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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.
Dani Shapiro