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" Here's the thing about lingerie: The only time we see it outside our own bedrooms, it is on women who are gloriously freakish in their physical perfection. "

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" Sometimes I pine for the era of Miss Manners, when there were hard and fast rules dictating a well-bred individual's behaviour in any given situation. "

" One day it hit me: Truest friends, God bless their hearts, could not care less. They love you, they're pleased you're getting married and, ultimately, they don't give a fig how you get it done. "

" Guys know how to read each other's signals. They know how to telegraph love for one another without throwing their arms around one another. "

" I've always been a sucker for any technology engineered primarily for the entertainment of the human race - even such technology as has been disguised as 'useful' or 'improving' when we all know the real virtue lies in its ability to distract and divert. "

" In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework. "

" I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance. "

" Let's not confuse traditional behaviours with good manners. The definition of etiquette is gender neutral - it simply means we strive at all times to ensure a person in our company feels at ease. "

" When a man tells a woman there is no chance of a formal, committed, long-term relationship, the only self-respecting response is to take him at his word and move on. "

" Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight. "

" Anger is one of those emotions that doesn't follow the letter of the law. It speaks before it thinks. It rears up on its hind legs and charges. "

" I'm no atheist - I'm lazy. I really do like hassle-free Sunday mornings. I have a problem with organized religion, so I've simply opted out. Live and let live, I figure. "

" Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs. "

" I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender. "

" It makes me proud not just to be a Canadian writer but to be a Canadian, to live in a country where we treat our writers like movie stars. "

" Ever since 'Strange Heaven,' I haven't really reread my old work. Not so much because I don't like the writer I was, or because I find flaws in the writing, but more because I get so burnt out on a novel once I've finished writing, revising, editing and copy editing it that I genuinely never want to look at it again after it's gone to press. "

" Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next. "

" Dating, like almost every other male-female interaction in present-day society, is based on outmoded and unequal social roles and expectations. "

" However long, it's definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness - that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness - always a surprise no matter how often it's happened - that their lives are very different from your own. "

" No matter how committed a marriage, there will always be other people - those we have chemistry with and those we don't, those we are attracted to, and those who shop for functional outdoors wear. The sooner a couple can accept the existence of the former and exchange a few basic reassurances concerning them, the easier life gets. "

" You can't really go into TV thinking, 'Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I'm only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.' I think you have to love what you're doing to do it well. "

" The masterstroke of male fraternity, I believed, was the practice of never speaking of anything remotely personal or related to one's emotions. That way, no one is ever made uncomfortable. Any such awkward moments can always be dispelled with a flurry of pretend-punches. "

" A bunch of chairs lined up in front of a podium equals school. "

" To buy dinner transmits that you feel time spent in your date's company has been a pleasure and a privilege. "

" Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes. "

" Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing. "

" I would just randomly blurt out things like, 'What if a man showed up today and was carrying an umbrella, but it wasn't raining?' Eventually, people started to call me weird. "

" I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job. "

" A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form. "

" While Person A might believe the kitchen counter provides a reasonable surface on which to place one's balled-up sweatsocks post-gym, Person B - about to cut up some vegetables on that same counter, perhaps for a meal intended to be shared with Person A - can only read the sockball as a message that says, 'Hi! I have contempt for you!' "

" The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it. "