Alice Mattison Quotes
Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.
There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.
Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.
I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.
Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.
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.
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.
Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.
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.
We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!
There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.
I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.
I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.
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.
I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
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.
