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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.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Feelings
Uncomfortable
Best
Worried
Even
Convinced
Work
Track
Afraid
Fruitful
Feeling
Secretly
Wrong
Clue
Comes
Discovered

More quotes by 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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If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.
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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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
Dani Shapiro
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Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
Dani Shapiro
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I was doing a lot of yoga and learning to meditate, and I found that extremely helpful, and still do and hopefully always will.
Dani Shapiro
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My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
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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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
Dani Shapiro
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Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.
Dani Shapiro
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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.
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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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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We are tyrannized by our options.
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.
Dani Shapiro
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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.
Dani Shapiro
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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.
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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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.
Dani Shapiro
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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
Dani Shapiro