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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.

Dani Shapiro

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Dani Shapiro
Age: 62
Born: 1962
Born: April 10
Author
Novelist
New York City
New York
Point
Hour
Wells
Meditation
Well
Minutes
Simply
Centering
Days
Showing
Practice
Twenty
Five
Twenties
Hours
Daily

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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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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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I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.
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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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Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
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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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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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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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I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.
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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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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 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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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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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 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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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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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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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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