Dani Shapiro Thinking Quotations

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.

It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art

It's not gender-specific, but I do think it's women who tend to start having that sort of little whispering voice of "I want more here" and "I want more for my family."

Our minds simply don't function in some sort of narrative chronology. I think that one of the great gifts of writing fiction is being able to think about that.

I remember getting my first cell phone in New York, getting into a taxi and thinking "This is the end of solitude in the back of a taxi." What used to happen in the back of a taxi? You looked out the window. My brain has become less able to spend lengths of time without shifting, and I worry about that.

When I was writing my first novel, I smoked cigarettes. And when I think about what it was like to smoke, I remember exactly the feeling of sitting in front of my big old computer in that little room where I wrote my first novel.

I think there's something about a writer's disposition, that is, even if unaware, always slightly in a witness state.

I think so much about how we read, about the nature of solitude, and of community, is changing in ways that none of us yet understand.