Dani Shapiro
Dani Shapiro
Daneile Joyce "Dani" Shapiro is the author of five novels and the best-selling memoirs Slow Motion and Devotion. She has also written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and ELLE...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 April 1962
CountryUnited States of America
kids television-commercials adults
I used to act in television commercials when I was a kid and a young adult.
beautiful jobs mean
There’s a great expression in Twelve Step programs: Act as if. Act as if you’re a writer. Sit down and begin. Act as if you might just create something beautiful, and by beautiful I mean something authentic and universal. Don’t wait for anybody to tell you it’s okay. Take that shimmer and show us our humanity. That’s your job.
We are tyrannized by our options.
running doors cities
When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.
struggle creating literature
Confidence is highly overrated when it comes to creating literature. A writer who is overly confident will not engage in the struggle to get it exactly right on the page - but rather, will assume that she's getting it right without the struggle.
writing persistence rejection
The writing life requires courage, patience, persistence, empathy, openness, and the ability to deal with rejection. It requires the willingness to be alone with oneself. To be gentle with oneself. To look at the world without blinders on. To observe and withstand what one sees. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks. To be willing to fail - not just once, but again and again, over the course of a lifetime.
waiting missing special
If I dismiss the ordinary—waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen—I may just miss my life.
country moving perspective
Moving to the country has been incredibly good for my work, for my sense of perspective.
art thinking trying
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
writing ongoing needs
Everything you need to know about life can be learned from a genuine and ongoing attempt to write
writing simple answers
How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'
fighting embrace things-to-do
The only graceful thing to do is recognize and embrace what is actually happening, rather than fight against it.
writing way window
Writing has been my window-flung wide open to this magnificent, chaotic existence-my way of interpreting everything within my grasp.
dream thinking trying
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.