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" 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. "

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" Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others. "

" Raffi Cavoukian was born in Cairo in 1948 and moved with his Armenian parents to Toronto when he was 10. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Growing up, I never knew that Raffi turned down celebrity endorsements, TV shows, and specials and refused to make merchandise, but it makes sense given how I think about him: My memories are limited to his voice through the record player and the album covers I stared at. "

" I find that when I'm in a relationship, I'm just so 'in it,' you couldn't even call it an art; it's such embroilment. With a friendship, you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more. "

" 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. "

" Writing plays, I've always felt a little like I'm guessing - less sure of what's good and what's not good. I think that's because it's not a complete work of art. "

" 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 just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way. I feel like there's this great fullness to being alone, and writing is a really vivid way and a really magical way of being alone. "

" There's so much to learn in writing and in life, and in any particular era in one's life, it seems like a few concerns have to be dealt with at once or else something really bad could happen. Writing seems like the place to deal with those concerns. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I think making friends you can work with is a skill like any other, developing those particular kinds of intimacies. They're intimacies like any other, but they grow in a definite direction, not just willy-nilly like normal friendships. "

" Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape. "

" Sometimes you can't write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it's good for your self-esteem to work on something else. "

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

" In my experience, women who are taken seriously take themselves seriously. It's not what you wear. "

" I saw what was wonderful about human companionship. Before that, I was quite content to be alone, to be a solitary wandering person, and I thought I always would be. Love changed that. "

" 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. "

" You don't go to tarot readers or psychics when everything's going well. It's always evidence of rock-bottom. "

" 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. "

" Women, post-menopause, go back to how they were before they started menstruating, and there's this great freedom in a woman's life when she reaches the end of that reproductive cycle, and that most women come into their own strength, the same strength they had as a girl. "

" 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. "

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

" Raffi doesn't have any grand theories about why his music has been so successful, but he credits a group called the Babysitters as early inspiration. "

" For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic. "