Quote

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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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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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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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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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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Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
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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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You can start your day over anytime.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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
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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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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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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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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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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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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
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