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" I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea. "

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" Henry James and Edith Wharton are huge for me because they gave me a way to understand America while still respecting the European backgrounds of my relatives. "

" I'm a big believer in the complex realities of young people's lives. "

" I remember going to a son's friend's bar mitzvah, and the text that he chose to explicate was right at the beginning of Genesis. It was not about a fall from grace or a fall from perfection; it was about an awakening into consciousness, which is what it means to be human. "

" I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada. "

" In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world. "

" Yes, writing is essential to me. It's my way of living in the world. "

" You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do. "

" When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it. "

" If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know. "

" I was in my senior year of high school when I read 'Notes From Underground' by Dostoyevsky, and it was an exhilarating discovery. I hadn't known up until that moment that fiction could be like that. Fiction could say these things, could be unseemly, could be unsettling and distressing in that particular way, that immediate and urgent way. "

" When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. "

" The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing. "

" I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? "

" This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore. "

" I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think. "

" For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite. "

" When I finish a book, I always fear that I'll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else - but nothing else makes me as happy. "

" If you live in a family or have five roommates, there's some sort of reality check, but when you live alone, there's a lot more leeway for your fantasy life to be more and more a part of your everyday life. "

" If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. "

" I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things. "

" Carmiel Banasky, a writer like no other, is a talent to watch. "

" Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues, like learning the dance steps when the dance is already under way. "

" Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?' "

" At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath? "

" The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things? "

" Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged. "

" If I look at my make-up, Canada is a huge part of what I am. "

" I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true. "