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

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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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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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Traces that live within us often lead us to our stories
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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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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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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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If we grew up with nothing, we're complicated with that. That's the thing I keep hearing from people.
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We don't choose what's going to wake us up.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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 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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If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt it has to be creative.
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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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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 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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