Dana Spiotta Quotes

26 quotes in 484 categories

• 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 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…
• 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…
• Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the…
• I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
• Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
• 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.
• I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
• I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.
• I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.
• It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
• That was one of the reasons I became a writer - I never really had that many friends. I would read a lot, and listen…
• 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…
• A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is…
• We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place…
• 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…
• Although a great restaurant experience must include great food, a bad restaurant experience can be achieved through bad service alone. Ideally, service is invisible. You…
• I don't have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that…
• 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…

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