Dana Spiotta Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Dana Spiotta

  Memories, Childhood, Emotion

  "Live Chat with Dana Spiotta". Interview with Macy Halford, www.newyorker.com. August 23, 2011.

  44 Copy quote

• I locate a great deal of the power of Occupy Wall Street in the name itself, 'Occupy Wall Street,' or '#OccupyWallStreet.' It works because the name contains everything you need to know: the tactic and the target. The name is also modular. You can create your own offshoot in your own city.

  Dana Spiotta

  Wall, Cities, Names

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Reason, Listening To Music, Many Friends

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Real, Character, Writing

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Reading, Impact, Stories

  "Dana Spiotta on living the creative life". Interview with Jacket Copy, latimesblogs.latimes.com. August 3, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Memories, Dysfunction, Needs

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  School, Trying, Acting

  "In 'Arabia,' Writing Life As You Wish You'd Lived It". Interview with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. September 22, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Character, Air, Issues

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Coherence, Satisfaction, Authenticity

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Long, Lazy, Afternoon

  Dana Spiotta (2006). “Eat the Document: A Novel”, p.73, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Writing, Order, Breathing

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Always Trying, Curiosity, Firsts

  "Dana Spiotta’s Age of Innocence". Interview with Jeff Vasishta, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 11, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

• 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 notice it only when something goes wrong.

  Dana Spiotta

  Great Restaurants, Invisible, Great Food

  "Control" by Dana Spiotta, www.newyorker.com. November 21, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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 can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.

  Dana Spiotta

  Teacher, Book, Skills

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  "Dana Spiotta on living the creative life". Interview with Jacket Copy, latimesblogs.latimes.com. August 3, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they're fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.

  Dana Spiotta

  People, Simplicity, Ease

  Source: www.believermag.com

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Book, Thinking, People

  4 Copy quote

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

  Dana Spiotta

  Writing, Long, Novel

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Inspirational, Issues, Choices

  Dana Spiotta (2012). “Stone Arabia”, p.10, Canongate Books

  4 Copy quote

• For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places.

  Dana Spiotta

  Moving, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.believermag.com

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Giving Up, Wall, Mean

  8 Copy quote

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

  Dana Spiotta

  Writing, Laundry, Wells

  4 Copy quote

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

  Dana Spiotta

  Artist, Luck, Shy

  Live Chat, www.newyorker.com. August 23, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Dana Spiotta

  Wall, Streets, Feels

  5 Copy quote

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

  Dana Spiotta

  Creating, Challenges, World

  Live Chat, www.newyorker.com. August 23, 2011.

  4 Copy quote

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