Alice Mattison Quotes
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The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
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I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
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Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
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Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.
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You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
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Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.
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When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
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Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
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I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
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I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
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I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
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I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
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There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
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You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.
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Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
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I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.
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Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
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It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
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There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
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The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
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Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.
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I just like doing it, I like writing.
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I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.
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Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.