Quotes from Dana Spiotta

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something crucial is at stake.

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

I like to buy books for the kids in my family. I guess that's why they call me the 'mean' aunt.

Yes, I did try acting when I was in high school and I was terrible at it. So I definitely have had the experience of being bad at artistic endeavor.

I don't have a lot of skills, but one thing I can do is, I can compartmentalize. I can make that a little world that I can go back to, so I can be a waitress, or I can be a teacher, and then go and work on my book.

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.

Why was so much noticed only in the breach, in the loss, by the regret-filled longing for what was left behind?

It interested Carrie, where the film was going, however obvious its point; how enslaved we are by our bodies, our selves concealed. How much are we our bodies? And why is it so different for women? Why is Nicole's tumid, faded person so much less appealing than worn, old Jack? And it isn't just success or money. It is men and women. Carrie felt a heat rise in her face.

Only recently did it dawn on me all the things I will never do: I will never have an apartment in Rome. I will never have another lover. I will never radically change my life again.

I want things to be normal. I want you to call me and tell me about your life. I want to hear about Ally, and I want to talk politics. I want to garden, and walk my dog. I want my life as it is and and as it has been, until I die.

One thing you discover in motherhood that you never understood from being a daughter and loving your mother—the mother end of things went deeper. After you gave birth, no sleep ever again would take you far from your child.

The issue isn't, Am I good enough? No. The issue is, Do I not have any other choice? Will and desire don't matter. Ability doesn't matter. Need is the only thing that matters.

Do you need an audience to create work, or does not having an audience liberate you and make you a truer artist?

Incidentally, if you have never stalked someone close to you, I highly recommend it. Check out how it tranforms them. How other they become, and how infinitely necessary and justified the stalking becomes when you realize how little you know about them, how mysterious every aspect of them seems with an at a distance but close examiniation.

He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future.

I'm thinking about past events. I'm interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.

That is the thing about films. They don't change. You change. The immutability of the film (or a book or a painting or a piece of music) is something to measure yourself against. That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.

Have you ever closed your eyes and listened to the sound of your own mother's voice?

A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word.

Memory all to easily accommodates the corruption of regret.

When I turned fifty, I was divorced, my son was grown up, and I realized I still had decades to go. It was the oddest thing—just as the culture began to lose interest in me, just as the world decided I was irrelevant, I began to feel more myself than ever. Louder, smarter, stronger. It felt truly adolescent, like I wanted to take drugs and drive fast and shave my head.

Cleanliness, particularly personal cleanliness, was an assertion against madness. It was a declaration of control.

And disruption is liberating, especially if it is a formal, organized disruption. Mere chaos causes anxiety. Preaching didactically causes boredom. But a formal disruption - Then it approaches beauty of a kind. Then you begin to really be dangerous.

I used to worry about being more efficient. Now, I think, 'Why? What is velocity, and why is that the ultimate value of everything?' The process is really messy, but it's so fun--and you discover weird things that you can only get from just meandering through stuff.