Explore Quotes by Dani Shapiro

There's a danger in romanticizing what it means to be a writer. Because what it really means is hard, hard work. It means tearing your hair out. Feeling like your head is about to explode.

If you write memoir, it can't be about blame or hurt; it has to be creative.

Sometimes, I'm driving along in my car, and a song from my high-school years comes on the radio: Springsteen's 'Thunder Road.' Just the opening few chords make me want to roll down the window and let the wind blow back my hair.

When it comes to the personal essays I write, I just convince myself that no one will ever read them.

The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.

Devotion, as it relates to the title of my memoir, means fidelity - as in fidelity to a person or a practice. I think it's certainly possible to feel devotion without having faith, at least in the religious sense of the word.

I was raised in an observant Jewish household, so for me, Hebrew prayers - the sounds, the sunlight streaming in from the stained-glass windows of a synagogue - bring my father back to me as surely as if he were sitting next to me, my head pressed against his shoulder.

Our minds have a tendency to wander. To duck and feint and keep us at a slight remove from the moment at hand.

As writers, it is our job not only to imagine, but to witness.

I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.

Writers are outsiders. Even when we seem like insiders, we're outsiders. We have to be. Our noses pressed to the glass, we notice everything. We mull and interpret. We store away clues, details that may be useful to us later.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

My parents made the decision never to focus on my looks, and I had no sense of myself as beautiful.

Music inspires me and puts me in the right mood, but to actually listen to it when I write - I find it gets in the way.

One of the stranger things about me is that I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I went to a yeshiva until I was thirteen years old and spoke fluent Hebrew.

When we reach reflexively for something to dull an ache inside of us, in that very moment of reaching, we are hiding from our pain. We're storing it away. Tamping it down.

I love living in the country, so much so that I'm even surprised by it. I have met lots of interesting people - the community was really welcoming, and I now probably have a more interesting social life than I did in the city.

With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.

I'm a full-time writer, which means I have the entire day to get my work done. But that can also be bad, because that means I have the entire day to get in my way.

I do strongly identify with being Jewish. I was raised Orthodox and had a childhood complicated by the fact that my father was deeply religious and my mother was not.

I'm an urban person who loves living in the country.