Dani Shapiro Quotes
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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!
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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.
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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.
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When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
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With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.
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One of the stranger things about me is that I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I went to a yeshiva until I was thirteen years old and spoke fluent Hebrew.
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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.
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I knew I wanted to be a writer before I knew that being a writer was possible.
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I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.
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My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.
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Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write – I find it gets in the way.
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When we reach reflexively for something to dull an ache inside of us, in that very moment of reaching, we are hiding from our pain. We're storing it away. Tamping it down.
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I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.