A Quote by Jami Attenberg

I always tell people this when they're looking for an agent - they should love your work. You are entitled to work with someone who believes in you. Why do business with someone who is ambivalent about you and your art?
My advice for finding a literary agent would be first, put your work out there as much as possible and hopefully someone will find you, because I still have literary agents writing to me after they find my site. You want someone who understands your work and is going to be your cheerleader from day one.
...treasure what it means to do a day's work. It's our one and only chance to do something productive today, and it's certainly not available to someone merely because he is the high bidder. A day's work is your chance to do art, to create a gift, to do something that matters. As your work gets better and your art becomes more important, competition for your gifts will increase and you'll discover that you can be choosier about whom you give them to.
I love you: You imagine hearing the words from someone not related to you, someone not your best friend, but when someone you love, someone you dream about, actually says them, it makes your body melt and your breath get caught in your chest.
Say who you are, really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won’t be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can’t help but be that. But more importantly, if you’re honest about who you are, you’ll help that person be less lonely in their world because that person will recognise him or herself in you and that will give them hope.
Don't do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.
You deserve someone who loves you with every single beat of his heart, someone who thinks about you constantly, someone who spends every minute of every day just wondering what you’re doing, where you are, who you’re with, and if you’re OK. You need someone who can help you reach your dreams and protect you from your fears. You need someone who will treat you with respect, love every part of you, especially your flaws. You should be with someone who could make you happy, really happy, dancing on air happy.
You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that's abnormal. That is why Christ was killed: he spoke against nature. You don't love someone for your whole life - that impossible hope is the source of adultery, matricide, betrayal of friends ... But you can hate someone for your whole life - provided he's always there to keep your hatred alive. Hatred warms the heart.
You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.
Eventually everyone has to hit the dark side of life - Someone doesn't like you, someone doesn't like your work, someone doesn't love you back... people die. What we have is a generation who are super-confident and super-positive about things, but when the least bit of darkness enters their lives, they're paralyzed.
When I interview people that want to work with us, I often disregard their resume, because a piece of paper, it doesn't tell me really who they are. I'm looking for honesty, vulnerability. I'm looking for strength, I'm looking for weakness. I'm looking also for someone that wants to learn and is excited about learning.
There will always be competition, especially in showbiz. There's always someone younger and hungrier standing behind you; there's always someone with more contacts; there's always someone whose grandfather or father is a filmmaker. I think your job is just to be there 100% - you work hard, and there are no shortcuts to success.
If you don't trust your own judgment as an artist, as someone who has contributed to a work of art, then why do it?
Love in the real world doesn’t usually work out the way stories make us think it should. We don’t always get fairy-tale endings. People split up and move on. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you can’t love someone else.” - Georgina to Brandy
You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.
For me, the most interesting people are ones who often work against their best interests. Bad choices. They go in directions where you go, 'No no no nooo!' You push away someone who is trying to love you, you hurt someone who's trying to get your trust, or you love someone you shouldn't.
Attention is a strange sort of being, anyway, the idea of attention if someone appreciates your work. It's always nice that someone appreciates your work.
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