Dani Shapiro Quotes
I'm very disciplined, but the one thing that I have addictive behavior about is the Internet.
I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.
All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies.
It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.
My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body.
What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter.
In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.
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.
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?
Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.
What's more important that spiritual life? It seems to me it's the bedrock of everything essential about being human.
When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I’m feeling.
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.
My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
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.
There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.
To forget oneself-to lose oneself in the music, in the moment- that kind of absorption seems to be at the heart of every creative endeavor.
Think of a ballet dancer at the barre. Plie, eleve, battement tendu. She is practicing, because she knows that there is no difference between practice and art. The practice is the art.
Gone was the reflexive need to see the worst in things. Before the tumors took her life, they gave her a few moments of grace.
The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.
My dad died when I was 23. His death was sudden and shocking - the result of a car crash - and I never got to say goodbye.
It wasn't so much that I was in search of answers. In fact, I was wary of the whole idea of answers. I wanted to climb all the way inside of the questions and see what was there.