Dana Spiotta Quotes & Sayings

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

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences. — Dana Spiotta

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

Memory all to easily accommodates the corruption of regret. — Dana Spiotta

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

The writer has to be brave, I think. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

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

I like the challenge of creating a world with only sentences. — Dana Spiotta

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

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities. — Dana Spiotta

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

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways. — Dana Spiotta

It smells not of decay but of disappearing, of disintegration. An invisible eating away. But that's not how it works, it doesn't eat away like acid. It gets into the metabolism of things and overstimulates them until they die. It hyper-accelerates growth until the organism is undone. Herbicide, he thinks, is a better word than defoliant, but neither conveys the endless insinuation of the stuff, the occupation. He breathes the dank spray
it's heavy, oily, metallic. It almost doesn't smell, but it clings to you, gets between you and your sweat then sinks into your skin. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

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

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

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

My teaching exists in a different part of my brain. However, I am lucky enough to teach very smart graduate students. — Dana Spiotta

He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future. — Dana Spiotta

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist? — Dana Spiotta

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

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

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

For me writing is an organic process that starts with engaging the language and then thinking about the structure of the novel as you move along. Especially in revision you start to notice correlations. Things come up, not self-consciously, because you're busy feeling your way through sentences and trying to push the language into new places. — Dana Spiotta

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

Getting an audience requires luck as well as talent. Some artists are private and shy. It costs them too much. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

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

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

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

That is the thing about films. They don't change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different. — Dana Spiotta

If you directly try to write about an idea, it will never be what you imagined. But if you're imagining through the building of sentences, through the characters, and paying attention to avoid ease and comfort yet still thinking about making the sentences work, you will get a shot at some real interesting stuff. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

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

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

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

And if I am comfortable with it, why do I still call it loneliness? Because
and I think somehow she would understand this
you can have and recognize a sadness in your alienation and in other people's alienation and still not long to be around anyone. I think that if you wonder about other people's loneliness, or contemplate it at all, you've got a real leg up on being comfortable on your own. — Dana Spiotta

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete. — Dana Spiotta

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

I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt. — Dana Spiotta

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it tranforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at a distance but close examiniation. — Dana Spiotta

I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

I always think the novelist should go to the culture's dark places and poke around. Pose a lot of hard questions. — Dana Spiotta

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

I'm turning fifty, and it is just now dawning on me that I have limited time," Nash said. "No kidding. I always felt my life was circumscribed by the finite terms, you know? There is a whole world of things I missed out on and will never experience. Whatever I have done, there is an endless amount I have not done. Do you know what that tells me?"
...
"It tells me it is not meant to be this all-encompassing journey. It is not meant to be catholic or encyclopedic. By now I have carved some grooves in this life. A few. What I need to do is hunker down and make those grooves deep and indelible. — Dana Spiotta

I wondered if my life was going to be one immersion after another, a great march of shallow, unpopular popular culture infatuations that don't really last and don't really mean anything. Sometimes I even think maybe my deepest obsessions are just random manifestations of my loneliness or isolation. Maybe I infuse ordinary experience with a kind of sacred aura to mitigate the spiritual vapidity of my life ... no, it is beautiful to be enraptured. To be enthralled by something, anything. And it isn't random. It speaks to you for a reason. If you wanted to, you could look at it that way, and you might find you aren't wasting your life. You are discovering things about yourself and the world, even if it is just what you find beautiful, right now, this second. — Dana Spiotta

Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to the sound of your own mother's voice? — Dana Spiotta

We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak's dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic. — Dana Spiotta

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

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

We identify ourselves by what moves us. — Dana Spiotta

You're trying to make the language work, and your subconscious is being allowed to make the deeper, more profound connections. It's much better than going at it all frontally. But you can't conjure it in an intellectual way; it has to come out of another engagement, a more intuitive engagement. Revision is where the intellectual, analytical work happens. At least for me. — Dana Spiotta

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

I want what I write to be deeply engaging and strange and true. — Dana Spiotta

And that's how a life changes
it could go either way, and then it just goes one way. — Dana Spiotta