Dani Shapiro famous quotes

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Jobs #Artist #Joy

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Dream #Thinking #Trying

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

#Writing #Way #Window

If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen—I may just miss my life.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Waiting #Missing #Special

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
-- Dani Shapiro

#Art #Thinking #Trying

Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Struggle #Creating #Literature

Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write
-- Dani Shapiro

#Writing #Needs #Ongoing

The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Writing #Persistence #Rejection

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.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Uplifting #Memories #Moving

Strange - I'm not much of a film person. I love watching films, but they don't stay with me the way books do. Stranger still, because my husband is a screenwriter!
-- Dani Shapiro

#Husband #Book #Way

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.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Dog #Mean #Tired

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

#Kids #Adults #Television

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

#Writing #Practice #Sitting Down

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

#Running #Home #Journey

Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Hands #Ducks #Mind

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

#Generations #Rubies #Links

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.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Mother #Religious #Father

When I sit down with my notebook, when I start scribbling words across the page, I find out what I'm feeling.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Notebook #Feelings #Pages

I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Disappointment #Careers #Order

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

#Beach #Rose #Wish

Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?'
-- Dani Shapiro

#Book #Next #Fleeting

Maggie Shipstead takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go. Astonish Me is a haunting, powerful novel.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Letting Go #Powerful #Haunting

Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Writing #Inspire #Way

Our pain is a part of who we authentically are.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Pain

It's essential to have sacred time for writing. All successful authors have some daily commitment to keep on-track and moving forward.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Moving Forward #Commitment #Writing

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Jobs #Imagine #Witness

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

#Wise #Book #Bigs

I’ve discovered that my best work comes from the uncomfortable but fruitful feeling of not having a clue – of being worried, secretly afraid, even convinced that I’m on the wrong track.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Track #Feelings #Clue

If I waited to be in the mood to write, I'd barely have a chapbook of material to my name. Who would ever be in the mood to write? Do marathon runners get in the mood to run? Do teachers wake up with the urge to lecture? I don't know, but I doubt it. My guess is that it's the very act that is generative. The doing of the thing that makes possible the desire for it.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Running #Teacher #Writing

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

#Country #Urban #Living In The Country

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.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Religious #Mean #Thinking

This sadness wasn't a huge part of me--I wasn't remotely depressed--but still, it was like a stone I carried in my pocket. I always knew it was there. [p. 179]
-- Dani Shapiro

#Sadness #Pockets #Stones

I don't know why this is, but I really believe that things don't happen when we're trying to will them into being. They don't happen when we're waiting for the phone to ring or the email to pop up in our inbox. They don't happen when we're gripping too tightly. They happen-if they happen at all-when we've fully let go of the results. And, perhaps, when we're ready.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Letting Go #Monday #Believe

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]
-- Dani Shapiro

#Country #Lonely #Husband

We are tyrannized by our options.
-- Dani Shapiro

There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Beautiful #Jobs #Mean

Writing well involves walking the path of most resistance. Sitting still, being patient, allowing the lunatic dream to take shape on the page, then the shaping, the pencil on the page, breathing, slowing down, being willing–no, more than willing, being wide open–to press the bruise until it blossoms.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Dream #Writing #Breathing

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.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Distance #Character #Stories

Recognize the possibility of the divine in any given moment.
-- Dani Shapiro

#Moments #Possibility #Divine

You can start your day over anytime.
-- Dani Shapiro

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

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

#Kissing #Joy #Moments

Courage is more important than confidence
-- Dani Shapiro

#Important

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

#Running #Haunting #Theme

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

#Hurt #Writing #Creative

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

#Writing #Simple #Answers

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

#Beautiful #Parent #Focus

I had spent my childhood and the better part of my early adulthood trying to understand my mother. She had been an extraordinarily difficult person, spiteful and full of rage, with a temper that could flare, seemingly out of nowhere, scorching everything and everyone who got in its way. [pp. 40-41]
-- Dani Shapiro

#Mother #Childhood #Trying