Top 63 Dana Spiotta Quotes
#1. Memory all to easily accommodates the corruption of regret.
Dana Spiotta
#2. There are lots of authentic, moving characters in so-called systems novels, just as there are certainly deep structural ideas in some character-driven novels.
Dana Spiotta
#3. Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to the sound of your own mother's voice?
Dana Spiotta
#4. She discovered, despite what people may imagine, having nothing to lost is a lot like having nothing. (But there was something to lose, even at this point, something huge to lose, and that was why this unknown, homeless state never resembled freedom.)
Dana Spiotta
#5. 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.
Dana Spiotta
#6. My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students.
Dana Spiotta
#7. Why was Will able to buy this cherished object, this marker of some long-past connection between two people, in an antiques store? At some point there had to be an ending, a death or a breakup, and it got tossed in a box to be given away or sold.
Dana Spiotta
#8. I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.
Dana Spiotta
#9. 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.
Dana Spiotta
#10. I think there's a false division people sometimes make in describing literary novels, where there are people who write systems novels, or novels of ideas, and there are people who write about emotional things in which the movement is character driven. But no good novels are divisible in that way.
Dana Spiotta
#11. I always think the novelist should go to the culture's dark places and poke around. Pose a lot of hard questions.
Dana Spiotta
#12. 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.
Dana Spiotta
#13. Yes, I did try acting when I was in high school and I was terrible at it. So I definitely have had the experience of being bad at artistic endeavor.
Dana Spiotta
#14. I am always trying to do something new and different. The first step is curiosity, questions. You pay attention to what fascinates you. If you can't shake it, there is something there.
Dana Spiotta
#15. All cultures have naming ceremonies. You have a given name, but then you get a chosen name. It's part of a transformation to adulthood. They tell you who you are, and then you decide who you are. It's like getting confined, or getting married.
Dana Spiotta
#16. I don't feel sentimental about the past, but I can't help noticing how hard it has become to keep a grip on anything. Maybe it's the totalizing impact of corporate culture, maybe it's the atomizing impact of technology.
Dana Spiotta
#17. Although a great restaurant experience must include great food, a bad restaurant experience can be achieved through bad service alone. Ideally, service is invisible. You notice it only when something goes wrong.
Dana Spiotta
#18. In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.
Dana Spiotta
#19. You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.
Dana Spiotta
#20. When I write characters, I need to hear their voice. As soon as I get them speaking, and I feel how they use language, I understand who they are and what they want.
Dana Spiotta
#21. I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.
Dana Spiotta
#22. Tell me it's forbidden, unthinkable, and that's where I want to go. Because the chances are it's complicated, and the complications are meaningful.
Dana Spiotta
#23. My teaching forces me to articulate what I think works in a piece of fiction and how I think it works. All of that gives me energy as a writer.
Dana Spiotta
#24. Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.
Dana Spiotta
#25. Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much.
Dana Spiotta
#26. I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences.
Dana Spiotta
#27. The idea that you can live off the grid and just do your own thing is a very American idea - that you should be able to do your own thing, if you want to, if you're willing to pay the price for it. I think the price has gotten higher and higher.
Dana Spiotta
#28. People think it's suspect and self-indulgent to make art, and I don't think that's true. Some people think you should be busy making something that you can sell in the marketplace, and if nobody wants to buy it, it must be crap. And that's not true.
Dana Spiotta
#29. I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.
Dana Spiotta
#30. Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?
Dana Spiotta
#31. All roads lead to Wall Street, but we feel the effects of Wall Street on every street corner. Certainly in Syracuse, N.Y., where I live.
Dana Spiotta
#32. Most human things are full of conflict and ambivalence, not ease and simplicity. The world has grown increasingly fundamentalist, and the parameters of discussion have become narrowed. People, when they're fearful, are vulnerable to certainty in rhetoric.
Dana Spiotta
#33. I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.
Dana Spiotta
#34. The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.
Dana Spiotta
#35. I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.
Dana Spiotta
#36. Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.
Dana Spiotta
#37. Each character requires different language, and these issues become inseparable. You have all these balls in the air: language, character, narrative. For me, the primary focus must be words, sentences, paragraphs.
Dana Spiotta
#38. I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.
Dana Spiotta
#40. Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.
Dana Spiotta
#41. I think most writers have to have a practice of writing. For me it is very early in the morning. I try to make it a separate world from the rest of my life.
Dana Spiotta
#42. Faintly, barely, she told herself maybe no one cared about what she had done. She was like John Dean, who described himself to the press as just a 'speck in the cosmos.' That was deeply reassuring, and it was also her worst fear. Time just went by.
Dana Spiotta
#43. And that's how a life changes
it could go either way, and then it just goes one way.
Dana Spiotta
#44. I find poignancy in the moments when a person realizes that she has made mistakes. I am not as interested in the mistakes themselves as I am with the consequences and how the person responds to her realization.
Dana Spiotta
#45. The door was open; I stepped in. A ghost town with a ghost theater, yet the former grandness still evident, the gold wallpaper peeling, the velvet seats in attendant rows, though ripped and ruined. Why did I cry? Not because it was a wreck, but because I felt the history.
Dana Spiotta
#46. 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.
Dana Spiotta
#47. That love seemed to increase their desire to undo the corporations that made them. It used to be you had to make munitions to piss people off. Now it was enough to be large, global and successful. That made it a more radical, systematic critique, Nash thought. And more futile, naturally.
Dana Spiotta
#48. The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.
Dana Spiotta
#49. 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.
Dana Spiotta
#50. The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.
Dana Spiotta
#51. My husband is a musician. He cooks and he's a chef but he also, he makes basement recordings. So many people in my life make basement recordings, so I feel very lucky, I'm surrounded by very creative people.
Dana Spiotta
#52. He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future.
Dana Spiotta
#53. It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.
Dana Spiotta
#54. I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true.
Dana Spiotta
#55. 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?
Dana Spiotta
#57. I take the outline from a real person as inspiration, but the in-line is totally made up. Which is why I usually invent imaginary names.
Dana Spiotta
#58. 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.
Dana Spiotta
#59. 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.
Dana Spiotta
#60. I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.
Dana Spiotta
#61. Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.
Dana Spiotta
#62. I am one Dana when I am talking to my daughter, another when I am talking to the IRS, and another still when I do an interview. These characters are just extreme versions of ordinary human self-switching.
Dana Spiotta
#63. Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.
Dana Spiotta
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