Words matter. These are the best Dani Shapiro Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers – the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue – bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.
When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them.
Strange – I’m not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don’t stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!
With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book – so every time, you have to start all over again.
If you write memoir, it can’t be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I’m not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
We secretly believe that if only we achieve some elusive goal – fitting into a pair of skinny jeans, or redoing our kitchen or getting that promotion – that it will make us happy. But the pain of our insecurity is hidden in all that racing around.
There’s a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.
I had never really felt settled in Brooklyn. I think it had to do with growing up in New Jersey and being someone who her whole life wanted to live in the city, and the city meant Manhattan.
I’m a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.
Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
Sometimes when I’m at my desk, I’ll realize that I have contorted myself completely, and I haven’t moved for hours, and that my legs have fallen asleep. I am elsewhere, not in my body, not in the room, not in my house.
Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there’s always the fear: ‘What about the next one?’
Our pain hides beneath these fluttering, random thoughts that run through our heads in an endless loop. But there’s so much freedom in getting to know what’s under there, the bedrock.
I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.
The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.
I don’t think it’s possible to separate out the strands of a writer’s history, circumstances, life events, and that writer’s themes.
I’m an urban person who loves living in the country.
I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.
Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we’re outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.
My dad died when I was 23. His death was sudden and shocking – the result of a car crash – and I never got to say goodbye.
My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.
If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live – the way you live – then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.
Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity – as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it’s certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.
