Dana Spiotta Quotes

I love a mask. It's why I've got a thing about good writing. When you're acting, you're going into someone else's work. You're behind his words; it's not you.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

I see myself as a story teller.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

When I first started writing plays I couldn't write good dialogue because I didn't respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking.

I've never understood why people said 'in your own words.' Who else's words would I use?

I think storytelling is a thing of beauty, and also very difficult. It's a craft you have to continue to work at.

I look at you and I write down what I hear.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

What I look for in any character, good or bad, is whether I can hear him speak. If I can imagine him that clearly, then I can write about him.

Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.

If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings, I would say the sentence.

Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.

In terms of writing characters or stories, at least initially, there's no difference between live-action and animation. A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

Language is the ticket to plot and character, after all, because both are built out of language.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

I do not speak through my characters; it's not a ventriloquist act.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.

It's hard to tell writers, especially in movies, that words are secondary. Behavior is important.

Words are my life.

People don't become writers because they love having spontaneous, real-world interactions with living people as bodies with clothes in time.