78 Quotes by Dana Spiotta

I am, it seems, interested in people with multiple identities. I think we all have multiple identities.

Even if we try to see people in our lives accurately, it is distorted by our own wants and prejudices and experiences.

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

I take the outline from a real person as inspiration, but the in-line is totally made up. Which is why I usually invent imaginary names.

I like to mix the real and the imaginary. Sometimes it is characters inspired by real people I know or know of. Sometimes it is a named person from the common cultural dreamscape. And it is tricky, because they have a lot of associated ideas that come with them, and a lot of actual facts.

We exist because of suburbia. Suburbia is a freak’s dreamworld, a world of extra rooms upstairs and long, lazy afternoons with no interference. A place where you can listen to your LPs for hours on end. You can live in your room, your own rent-free corner of the universe, and create a world of pleasure and interest entirely centered on yourself and your interior aesthetic and logic.

You are always working towards the moments in which characters experience reckonings or insight or change. I like to track them past those moments.

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.

Usually there is a paradox in what a character wants. A conflict is built deeply within them. And then you put them in motion, throw everything at them until they reveal themselves further.