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" As a journalist, you don't tend to interview people with a view to becoming their friend. You can't expect that. It's not professional. "

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" I wanted to talk to a lot of women about their experiences along the path to motherhood - or along the path to not being a mother. "

" Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances! "

" An artist's love for what they create is what creates love. "

" It's so weird how our existence hinges on just absolute crazy chance, but it feels so essential. It's like, 'Nothing would be here if you weren't here,' because you are the centre of your universe. "

" A woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Non-mothers do, too. "

" I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling. "

" The thing to do when you're feeling ambivalent is to wait. "

" Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions. "

" I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing. "

" I don't think about the reader when I'm writing, but I do when I'm editing, of course. For instance, I self-consciously didn't want to do anything to increase the divide between mothers and nonmothers - I think that divide is so horrible and destructive and unnecessary. "

" Raffi is arguably the world's most famous children's singer. "

" The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it. "

" There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear. "

" A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts. "

" I didn't wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration. "

" We're so sure of what our unlived lives would have been like that we feel guilty for not living them - for not living up to our potential. "

" There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the supposed life cycle. "

" A daughter is more difficult than a rose. "

" Some of my favorite experiences of art are when I am there but my attention has wandered. I think stimulation is overrated, and persistent stimulation is exhausting. You sometimes have to be banal, tedious: make the rhythm go soft and slow, give the mind a rest. "

" Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen. "

" I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true. "

" No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy. "

" I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person. "

" Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels. "

" Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. "

" I really enjoyed the process of 'Women in Clothes,' but there's no way I would have done that again. It felt more like being an editor than a writer, and I longed to write again. "

" Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture. "

" I have this memory of being 15 years old, sitting with a friend on the steps of a little bookstore on Bloor Street in Toronto and saying, 'I'll never take money for my writing!' I had such idealism about this idea of trading your soul for money. "

" Laurie Simmons began showing her photographs in New York in the late '70s: black-and-white and then candy-colored scenarios with plastic dolls in 1950s-style domestic interiors. "

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" Women without children can help mothers, and we can just be all in this together. "