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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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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Essentials
Spiritual
Seems
Human
Everything
Humans
Important
Bedrock
Life
Essential

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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 could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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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 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]
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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.
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You can start your day over anytime.
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There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.
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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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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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My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
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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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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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We are tyrannized by our options.
Dani Shapiro
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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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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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Courage is more important than confidence
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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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