Quote

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.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Belong
Seriously
Understood
Stuff
House
Journals
Didn
Clearing
Writing
Journal
Work
Garbage

More quotes by 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.
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At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.
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Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
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We are tyrannized by our options.
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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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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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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 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.
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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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It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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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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If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.
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You can start your day over anytime.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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