Quotes from Alice Mattison

Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.

When a man I like touches my arm or my hair, I want to know if he'll touch the center of me, and whatever I learned in school--I went to school for a long time--I seem to believe that my center can be reached best with the tip of a penis....

When a draft looks terrible, I don't try to convince myself that it's actually good or even that someday it will be, only that it's my job to work on it whether it's good or not.

She could recognize the change in the air when anybody in her family, anywhere in the house, began to read. The air was roomier, because the reader was elsewhere.

Invention comes about when we let it, when we don't mind feeling stupid as we do it— it feels like what children do, it is what children do — when we clear a place for it, become quiet, and wait.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.