Alice Mattison quotes:

I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.

The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.

We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

I just like doing it, I like writing.

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.

Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.

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....

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.

We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.

Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.

When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.

I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.

Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what people need is the sense of not being alone. They go to MFA programs to be part of a community of people who care, and then you start caring about your friend who is trying to edit a magazine and your other friend who is stuck in the middle of her poem. There you have all kinds of things to worry about besides your own success.

Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.

This is true in other fields, too, that a legal aid lawyer gets a whole lot less money than a Hollywood lawyer who handles the estates of celebrities. Maybe the legal aid lawyer is doing something better, though, and maybe they're happier. It's not a completely unheard of idea, but I do think we have to remind ourselves at times to look for satisfaction in other ways.

Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!

You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not appeal to as many readers but will be incredibly meaningful to the readers you have. Truly, that's as wonderful if not more wonderful.

There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.

The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.

I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.

I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.

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 find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.

Little children are all writers.

When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when they get to be young teenagers they're not anymore. You might go and talk to them about writing, and they'll be very self-conscious or will have detached themselves from the group.

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

I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.

I remember I had had one woman who had three or four kids, and some of them were having problems. I said, 'Maybe you could go write somewhere else, away from your house.' And sure enough, all kinds of wonderful stuff emerged. She was keeping too much charge of herself because she couldn't stop being a mother when she was in the house. You have to find your own way of letting loose, if you're one of those people.

Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.

For some people, it's very easy to be spontaneous and they can pour out the most wonderful stuff. But it's really hard to exert control over it, to think, 'Well, this could be different. This could go in the opposite order, there could be more here and less there.' For other people, it's much easier to have rules and a methodology, but much harder to let loose and allow their feelings to come pouring out on the page. They're more shy or they're just more distant from their emotions. I think everybody starts with one or the other.

Even murderers, I suppose, experience the loss of car keys the way the rest of us do. I mean, how can they not? Once you make this person scramble around the house looking for her car keys and finally find them, get in the car, and run into traffic, we can identify with her enough that when she stops the car and pulls the gun out of her purse and heads in to kill somebody, we'll be with her as much as is possible.

Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.

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

I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.

I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

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.

Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.

Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.

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.

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'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.

You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.

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

There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.

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.

It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.