Dana Spiotta Quotes

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

All roads lead to Wall Street, but we feel the effects of Wall Street on every street corner. Certainly in Syracuse, N.Y., where I live.

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.

I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.

My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.

I always think the novelist should go to the culture's dark places and poke around. Pose a lot of hard questions.

I take the outline from a real person as inspiration, but the in-line is totally made up. Which is why I usually invent imaginary names.

That was one of the reasons I became a writer - I never really had that many friends. I would read a lot, and listen to music. And that was my life.

Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.

When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.

I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.

The writer has to be brave, I think.

The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.

There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.

My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.

Tell me it's forbidden, unthinkable, and that's where I want to go. Because the chances are it's complicated, and the complications are meaningful.

I think there's a lot to be learned from pop culture. But at the same time I see the dangers of using it in an exclusive way to construct meaning in your life.

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.

I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.

Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

Yes, I did try acting when I was in high school and I was terrible at it. So I definitely have had the experience of being bad at artistic endeavor.

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

I have to say that movies have as much impact on me as music. And that I learned as much about narrative from movies as I did from reading novels, how to arrange stories, how to juxtapose things.

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

I am always trying to do something new and different. The first step is curiosity, questions. You pay attention to what fascinates you. If you can't shake it, there is something there.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.