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" At university, my generation were ready to fight, but we didn't really have anything to fight for. "

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" It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that. "

" We think that we know people from this constellation of points: 'I know that story. I know that girl. I've heard that story a thousand times.' But actually, you never know that story. "

" An abiding preoccupation for me is how much of our lives are invisible and unknown by other people, like the Chekhov story 'The Lady With the Little Dog.' "

" If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit. "

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

" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "

" 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. "

" I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last. "

" There's this moment when kids realize that they have power and that they can use it. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

" We're all living in some state of illusion, even if modestly. "

" 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. "

" There is that time right around 30 when you think, your twenties have gone by, and now you really are a grown up, and you do have to figure out what you're going to do. "

" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "

" If people like something you've done - or don't like it - this shouldn't determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world's response to it. "

" 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. "

" Awards bolster your confidence in wonderful ways. But they aren't the world. "

" In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them. "

" I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself. "

" 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?' "

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

" For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable. "

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

" 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. "

" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "

" We are all unappealing. It is just a matter of how much we let people see it. "

" 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. "

" For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular. "

" Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try. "

" I always feel as though I'm not quite Canadian enough for everybody. "