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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?

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Open
Mine
Point
Close
Past
Doors
Back
Behinds
Going
Behind
Preoccupation
Really
Writer
Blow
Fiction
Door
Leave
Mines

More quotes by Dani Shapiro

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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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We are tyrannized by our options.
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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 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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Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.
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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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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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Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.
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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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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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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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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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Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.
Dani Shapiro
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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.
Dani Shapiro
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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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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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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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We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.
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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.
Dani Shapiro