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" I guess you could say I'm 'kind' to my past books in the way you might be kind to an old boyfriend you still quite like and bear no grudge against but with whom have absolutely no interest in getting back together. "

Lynn Coady

Past

You

Back

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" It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista. "

" I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction. "

Lynn Coady

World

Time

" 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. "

Lynn Coady

Day

Care

" Something I've always written about is social expectations: that the eyes of the community are on you all the time, expecting you to line up with certain social norms, certain behaviours. Whenever you forgot about them, they'd be strongly reiterated to you, in no uncertain terms. "

" That's what fascinates me about these writers' retreats: You're in these small spaces with small groups of people, and all of the sudden, the spotlight is shining on you harder than it normally is. "

" 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. "

Lynn Coady

Gender

Women

" 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. "

Lynn Coady

Fundamentals

Conflict

" No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness. "

" 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. "

" Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity. "

" 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. "

" We allow ourselves to unclench when we're home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy. "

" I decided a long time ago to be myself and not worry too much about cultivating some kind of personality that didn't feel natural or true to who I am. "

" 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. "

" Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game. "

" 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. "

" I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches. "

" I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing. "

" Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist. "

" That's all small talk is - a quick way to connect on a human level - which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it's worth making the effort. "

" You don't need to have Asperger's to feel bewildered in a culture that relies so heavily on inconsequential chit-chat to grease the wheels of day-to-day life. "

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

" I should say I am not much of a gamer - anymore. The reason for this is that I have to make a living, and my body requires vitamin D, and I've come to value the heady pleasures of human interaction over the temporary exhilaration of reaching the 'next level.' "

" Most don't live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas. "

" I really do think of it in moral terms. I think that we can't kid ourselves that the storytelling impulse is innocent and does nothing but bring good to the world. "

" Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It's like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated. "

Lynn Coady

How

Strong

" I don't even like to cry in private. "

Lynn Coady

Cry

Even

" I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society. "

" 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. "

" It's kind of sad, the way we've turned the entertainment of reading into a kind of psychic broccoli - something to feel guilty about if you don't force it on your face-making children while dutifully consuming a few token florets yourself. "