Alice Mattison Quotes

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

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.

Little children are all writers.

When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.

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.

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.

Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

I don't have the courage not to write all the time.

I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.

The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.

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 don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.

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.

Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.

I just like doing it, I like writing.

You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.

We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.

Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.

I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.

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.

The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.

Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.

This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.

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.

Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

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.

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.

I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.

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.

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.

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.

Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.

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.

I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.

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.

Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.

When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.