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" Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down. "

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" The reason I write is because I have questions. What I don't want is for people to forget that I'm a novelist and think I'm a sociologist or something. I don't want to feel trapped into a corner where I don't belong. "

" Writing, for me, when I'm writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I'm writing, the character or self I'm writing about and my whole self - when I began the book - become entwined. It's soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I'm trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts. "

" 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. "

" Toronto is my home. It's where my family is. I think I feel an obligation to be within subway distance of the people who raised me. "

" When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters. "

" I wished to have the time to put together a world view, but there was never enough time, and also, those who had it seemed to have had it from a very young age; they didn't begin at forty. "

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

" I'd rather that people could be both entertained and given rest while reading my book than for someone to have to put the book down to take a rest. You can't just be lighting firecrackers all the time. "

" I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology. "

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

" It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged. "

" 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 just always try to respond to what I'm most interested in at the moment - that hasn't changed. "

" I remember very vividly a little plaid dress on which my father sewed all these hanging beads, little horses and stuff. It was my favourite thing ever. I had it when I was four, and I kept it until I was 12, when I gave it to the little neighbour girl. For years, I regretted giving it to her, even though I had no use for it. "

" If you want to write from life, you can't really write a story. People are always changing, and I think if we didn't look the same day-to-day, and our self weren't always in our body, would we even be the same? The continuity is in our bodies. "

" I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my mid-twenties. "

" Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not. "

" I think that part of the reason I like collaboration so much is because it's something unexpected coming in, and you have to stretch yourself to absorb it. "

" I remember where I was when I wrote that story, 'Mermaid in a Jar.' I was at a boyfriend's, and he was the only boy I ever dated who was rich, and his parents had a ski chalet, and I just didn't know how to break up with him, so I decided I would be celibate. "

" To add something to the world should be the question, not not adding something to the world. "

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

" 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. "

" Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head... it's really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it's cheating. "

" 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. "

" You think you're writing the most important book, you think you're writing the most stupid book, and you never really know before it's done that it's going to be done. "

" Today, I defined 'sentimental' to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My feminism is just part of my being - a part of my understanding of the world. "

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