Dani Shapiro Art Quotations

Open your hearts. Deep inside ourselves, we are all one and the same.

I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.

I often envy my friends who are visual artists. Visual artists have other things to work with. Other media. I envy my sculptor friends: they have hunks of matter. Marble. Wood. It's physical, which I find very appealing. What we have is nothing, is just glaringly blank.

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache.

My son is now fourteen, and from the moment he was born, I understood that forevermore my heart would be walking around outside my body.

We can't protect ourselves from pain and heartache. In fact, to love - fully, madly, deeply - is the ensure heartache some day.

Part of my spiritual work is learning to live with the knowledge that we can't protect our loved ones from pain and heartache.

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

I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it.