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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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Right
Creating
Confident
Writer
Highly
Struggle
Assume
Literature
Page
Getting
Assuming
Rather
Pages
Overly
Comes
Exactly
Overrated
Without
Confidence
Engage

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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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In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.
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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 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.
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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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There is no end to the promotion. There is no end to the possibilities. You can continue to promote a book for years, literally.
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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]
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I did want to feel like life's all of one piece.
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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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Courage is more important than confidence
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We are tyrannized by our options.
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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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You can start your day over anytime.
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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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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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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
Dani Shapiro
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We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.
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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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I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.
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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.
Dani Shapiro