Top 138 Quotes & Sayings by Dani Shapiro - Page 3

Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.

There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the writer has to be able to transcend the life, to see it as if standing outside of it, in order to be able to make something of it. There's something enormously satisfying and gratifying about crafting something, taking all that chaos and giving it shape.

We're all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community.

When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.

I never troll for material. It simply presents itself, and is always unmistakable. This is why I want to roll my eyes when people interrupt themselves in the middle of some story they're telling me to say, "You know you can't write about this."

Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.

I found myself doing so much public speaking, more and more and bigger and bigger.

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don't.

I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.

You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.

When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.

I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.

If there's anything weirder than an introverted writer going to lots of social functions, it's an introverted writer being converted into an accidental guru.

I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.

I never feel so alive as when I'm writing and the work is going well.

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.