Dani Shapiro Quotes

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters.

I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.

When I near the end of a book, it feels as if the entire universe meets me more than halfway and supports me. The whole world seems to shimmer when I find the words. My mind quiets.

When I was starting out there was no Internet, there wasn't this sense that you could be connected to other writers around the world. And that created a kind of innocence, or parochial quality, even in NYC.

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.

Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.

Michael Lowenthal has written a big-hearted and wise book about familial love in all its richness and complexity.

We don't choose what's going to wake us up.

As a writer we are our own instruments; we need to protect our instrument, because no one will protect it if we don't.

I'm most connected to myself when I'm alone in a room, moving my hand across a page. That's when I feel most like me.

I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.

At some point each day (well, most days) I unroll my mat and practice for an hour. I sit in meditation for a while. This can be five minutes or twenty minutes, but the daily practice - simply showing up for it - is centering.

Let me tell you something about hypochondria: It's a pernicious, undermining little demon. It won't kill you, but it will sap the color from your life so that in the loveliest moments, the moments of grace, you are hit with that whisper in your ear that takes it all away. I'm sick, I'm dying - I just don't know it yet.

We're all simultaneously separated and connected by our devices, staring into our little screens, and also hungry for experience and community.

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

It's not gender-specific, but I do think it's women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of "I want more here" and "I want more for my family."

In every generation there is a vault-keeper, one who guards the links fiercely and knows they are more precious than rubies.

I do keep a tiny little journal in which I write passages that I read and want to hold on to. This practice is sort of the opposite of Twitter.

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.

Those memories that are engraved within me become teaching tools, ways of connecting with others, of creating an empathic bridge, of reaching out a hand and saying, I've been there, too.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

All there is to do, right at this very moment, is to breathe in, breathe out, and kiss the joy as it flies.

I could spend two years cross-legged on my floor and feel like I was working.

What was going on inside of me became louder because everything around me became quieter.

It's easier in an urban world to cast the blame outward. So I've learned a lot about my own process in that way.

When I was growing up, I had no idea that I could possibly become a writer. I wrote endlessly in journals - a practice I maintained for a long time, well into the writing life I had no idea I could ever have.

In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there. ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself. [p. 123]

The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.

I've always felt like my nose is pressed to glass. I always feel a little bit like an outsider.

With tremendous clarity and wisdom, Daniel Tomasulo has crafted a memoir at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Layers of time and memory—childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, middle age—are so beautifully revealed here, a trenchant reminder that our pasts are alive inside of us. There are psychologists who can write, and writers who can psychologize, but rarely have the two met on the page with such moving, profound results.

I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking "This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi." What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.

You can start your day over anytime.

Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.

I started realising that the themes running through all of my novels were really haunting and obsessing me about my own life.

My desk is covered with talismans: pieces of rose quartz, wishing stones from a favorite beach.

In a creative journey, it is essential, no matter how far one runs, to examine that which is closest to home.

A writer with her work needs to be like a dog with a bone all the time. She needs to know where she's hidden it. Where she's stored the good stuff. She needs to keep gnawing at it, even after all the meat seems to be gone. When a student of mine says (okay, whines) that she's impatient, or tired, or the worst: isn't it good enough? this may be harsh, but she loses just a little bit of my respect. Because there is no room for impatience, or exhaustion, or self-satisfaction, or laziness. All of these really mean, simply, that the inner censor has won the day.

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache.

I'll have my students try to follow their minds during the course of a day, just to see the way their minds work, the way our minds hop from thing to thing to thing. The Internet mirrors that to such a degree you can actually see it. Show me your search history and I'll show you who you are.

Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.

My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.

You have to believe in yourself before the world has given you any indication that you should believe in yourself as a writer.

Everything I know about life I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write.

Logic and faith don't occupy the same side.

I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.

I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.

The fact is that most husbands, regardless of religion - it's an old-fashioned gender divide where the husband wants to stay home and the wife is the one who drags herself and her children to whatever spiritual center they're going to.