Danielle Dutton Quotes

#1. It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, and you can't change a single word, it's a totally different thing. I was surprised by what that thing was.

Danielle Dutton

#2. Yet why must grammar be like a prison for the mind? Might not language be as a closet full of gowns? Of a generally similar cut, with a hole for the head and neck to pass, but filled with difference and a variety of trimmings so that we don't grow bored?

Danielle Dutton

#3. There was a stage inside it and a crank on the outside that would rotate something, like a tiny tree carved of cork, onto the stage, and then the thousands of little mirrors would multiply that one tree so that the viewer would see an infinite forest instead.

Danielle Dutton

#4. I suppose also that watching marketing and publicity stuff play out from behind the scenes, making those plans and seeing each piece fall into place or not, each year, for each book, has made me a little more tranquil about the process for my own book than I might otherwise be.

Danielle Dutton

#5. I'm not sure running the press has changed how I write (though perhaps it has in ways I can't see), but it has certainly changed my relationship to how books get made.

Danielle Dutton

#6. Does every river make a music of its own?

Danielle Dutton

#7. I sense people expect something to show for ten years. But I do feel like it is dense. Some of my own favorite books are slim, but there's a lot of weight and power in them.

Danielle Dutton

#8. As a publisher what you are trying to build is a long life for a book, to help it find its readers in many different ways, whether or not it made this list or got that review, etc. I'm sure some of that thinking has been useful to me as a writer as well.

Danielle Dutton

#9. So it was this multi-perspective, multi-character book, and it went through all of these different manifestations. I'm not sure there was a single moment where I thought to myself, Oh, I need to write about Margaret Cavendish. She just kept taking over the book I thought I was writing.

Danielle Dutton

#10. Back then, when I had that original idea to write about the seventeenth century, the whole thing was set in 1666. I was thinking of Margaret near the end of her life, and that was the voice I heard for her.

Danielle Dutton

#11. I had rather be a meteor, single, alone.'

Plus Paris itself was noisome. Even with its glittering bridges and orangeries, even if the birthplace of ballet.

'I had rather been a meteor, than a star in a crowd.

Danielle Dutton

#12. I was trying to focus on Margaret's trajectory as an artist, as a woman and an artist. Hopefully Cavendish experts won't be angry at me for anything I've left out. I feel like all the major movements of her life are there.

Danielle Dutton

#13. I would be researching seventeenth-century garden design or I would be doing something with Pepys, but I just kept using all of it to write about Margaret Cavendish. It took me a long time to realize that I just wanted to write a book about her. Years.

Danielle Dutton

#14. Yet how hard it is to point to a moment. To say: there, in that moment, I changed.

Danielle Dutton

#15. I had all these sparkles I'd collected and wanted to work in, but when I originally started writing it and it was originally this novel about all these people set in 1666, what I was so interested in was the New Science.

Danielle Dutton

#16. It's interesting, editing can be so immersive for me that I've noticed that the authors I edit have a pretty profound effect on how I hear language for a while.

Danielle Dutton

#17. It was indescribable what she wanted. She was restless. She wanted to work. She wanted to be thirty people. She wanted to wear a cap of pearls and a coat of bright blue diamonds. To live as nature does, in many ages, in many brains

Danielle Dutton