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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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Firsts
Novel
Smoke
First
Rooms
Wrote
Writing
Feeling
Fronts
Think
Bigs
Exactly
Thinking
Feelings
Front
Like
Remember
Computer
Smoked
Littles
Sitting
Cigarettes
Little
Room
Cigarette

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Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
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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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I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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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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I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
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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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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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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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Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.
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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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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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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.
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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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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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We are tyrannized by our options.
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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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Courage is more important than confidence
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I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi. What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.
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When I started meditating, even doing yoga, I felt like it was hard to allow myself to develop any other kind of practice [outside of Judaism], like I was somehow being untrue to my heritage, and that was something I had to get over and was probably the greatest revelation to me.
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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.
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