Alice Mattison Quotes
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Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.
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There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.
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We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.
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I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.
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The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
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I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.
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You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
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I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
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I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
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Little children are all writers.
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We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
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There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
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I just like doing it, I like writing.
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I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
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If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.
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Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
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I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!
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Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
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This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.
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I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
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We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
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For some people, it's very easy to be spontaneous and they can pour out the most wonderful stuff. But it's really hard to exert control over it, to think, 'Well, this could be different. This could go in the opposite order, there could be more here and less there.' For other people, it's much easier to have rules and a methodology, but much harder to let loose and allow their feelings to come pouring out on the page. They're more shy or they're just more distant from their emotions. I think everybody starts with one or the other.
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I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.
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I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
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