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" I have always been interested in that relationship between what happens in our head and what happens in the world. "

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" The relevant question isn't, 'Is this a potential friend for me?' but, 'Is this character alive?' "

" I still believe on some level that at the end, somebody will say, 'You get an A-minus for your life.' And it's not true. It's not true. "

" The more accurately one can illuminate a particular human experience, the better the work of art. "

" I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson. "

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

" 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. "

" I have said it somewhere - our literary lived lives are as important as our literally lived lives. "

" 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. "

" My husband had a stalker, briefly. "

" We live in a culture that wants to put a redemptive face on everything, so anger doesn't sit well with any of us. But I think women's anger sits less well than anything else. "

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

" For me, the watershed was Hurricane Katrina. If that didn't get people out on the streets, then what will? "

" Everybody's always living in fiction just as much as children, but the way our stories are faked is curtailed by all sorts of narratives we take into our own lives about what are the true narratives and what's not. "

" Sometimes I think about all the hours spent making lunches, carting kids from one place to another, being up in the middle of the night taking temperatures. People who haven't had to do that have, say, read every last book up there from cover to cover and probably remember it. There are trade-offs. But more life is more life. "

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

" I feel as though there's a lot invested in my background in being an outsider. "

" To be weighed down by things - books, furniture - seems somehow terrible to me. "

" The way I saw the world as a child was not wrong. And it's okay to see the world that way. If it doesn't hurt anybody. "

" My tendencies are much more the Henry James thing, where we sit in silence at the table for three minutes, and our whole lives are changed because of a revelation that never quite happens but almost bubbles to the surface. "

" When you're a kid, and someone is your best friend, you almost don't need words. It's almost like puppies in a - frolicking in a garden or something. You don't articulate stuff. You just live it. "

" Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine. "

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

" This sense in which so much of who we are doesn't break the surface - our knowability to one another is always something I like to explore. "

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

" A painting lets us know how somebody literally saw things. A piece of music is another language that transmits a whole wealth of emotion and wordless experience. But writing is special in the way at allows us to temporarily enter another person's world, to step outside the boundaries of our own time and space. "

" 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. "

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

" If I hear a story or a fact about somebody I don't know and have never met, it's like getting a hollow vessel that you can fill up with whatever you want. That's more tempting to me than to try to replicate what I actually know. "

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

" As a reader since very early, I have found myself drawn to rants. "