Dana Spiotta Quotes

I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.

As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner's pick, a wood carver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

The minute you start putting words on paper you're eliminating possibilities.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

Some people say, 'Write what you know.' My thing is, 'Write what scares you.'

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.

When I start writing these novels, I go into them with a spirit of inquiry rather than to substantiate prejudices I had in the beginning. If you don't do that, you can't write good characters.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

I want to write books.

I'm always telling myself as I write that I'm not really writing a novel; I'm just going to fool around with a character or an idea.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

The inspiration for my novels comes from the depths of a creative well, based on asking myself questions over and over. I try to write something different each time I sit down to write; I try to surprise the readers.

Writing will be like a journey, every word a footstep that takes me further into undiscovered land.

A writer is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things.

The artist’s job, I think, is to be a conduit for mystery.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

Writing is the crack through which you can crawl into a bigger world, into your wild mind.