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.

- Dana Spiotta

The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.

- Dana Spiotta

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are n…

- Dana Spiotta

The writer has to be brave, I think.

- Dana Spiotta

Your memories from your early childhood seem to have such purchase on your emotions. They are so concrete.

- Dana Spiotta

A good novel should be deeply unsettling - its satisfactions should come from its authenticity and its formal coherence. We must feel something cruci…

- Dana Spiotta

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 …

- Dana Spiotta

That was one of the reasons I became a writer - I never really had that many friends. I would read a lot, and listen to music. And that was my life.

- Dana Spiotta

In order to be a living, breathing thing, a novel has to be failed in some kind of way. Or at least that's how I keep writing them.

- Dana Spiotta