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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

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Write
Music
Inspires
Find
Puts
Right
Mood
Writing
Inspire
Way
Listen
Gets
Actually

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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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 near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.
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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
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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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We are tyrannized by our options.
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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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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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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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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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
Dani Shapiro
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I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
Dani Shapiro
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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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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.
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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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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Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories
Dani Shapiro
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I did want to feel like life's all of one piece.
Dani Shapiro
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I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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