Words matter. These are the best Dana Spiotta Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.
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.
I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
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.
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 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.
There’s lots of things that can’t make it in the world that are worth making. There are lots of great artists who never make it, there are lots of great writers who don’t get published – is it still worthwhile? Aren’t we glad people are still doing it?
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.
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.
