Dana Spiotta Quotes
-
I think it's harder than ever to be an artist. I think that you end up, especially as a middle-aged person, you pay such big consequences for saying, 'I'm just going to devote my life to making art,' or 'I'm going to devote my life to writing novels.' You end up with no resources.
→ -
Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
→ -
I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.
→ -
I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.
→ -
Each character requires different language, and these issues become inseparable. You have all these balls in the air: language, character, narrative. For me, the primary focus must be words, sentences, paragraphs.
→ -
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 where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic.
→ -
Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel itself disorderly or dysfunctional.
→ -
You're trying to make the language work, and your subconscious is being allowed to make the deeper, more profound connections. It's much better than going at it all frontally. But you can't conjure it in an intellectual way; it has to come out of another engagement, a more intuitive engagement. Revision is where the intellectual, analytical work happens. At least for me.
→ -
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 find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization.
→ -
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 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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
I don't feel sentimental about the past, but I can't help noticing how hard it has become to keep a grip on anything. Maybe it's the totalizing impact of corporate culture, maybe it's the atomizing impact of technology.
→ -
Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.
→ -
My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people.
→ -
I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
→ -
If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff.
→ -
I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.
→ -
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 am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
→ -
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.
→ -
You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.
→
Related Authors
-
Amor Towles Author -
Don DeLillo Writer -
Jennifer Egan Novelist -
Amy Waldman Author -
Zachary Lazar Novelist -
Leah Hager Cohen Author -
Teju Cole Writer -
Ben Lerner Poet -
Rachel Kushner Writer -
George Saunders Writer -
Elisabeth Tova Bailey Author -
Edith Pearlman Short story writer -
Mary Karr Poet -
Arthur Phillips Novelist -
J. Robert Lennon Novelist