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" 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. "

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" Everyone has to put clothes on in the morning, and it's interesting to see how much people's personal histories come into that decision. "

Sheila Heti

People

Decision

See

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

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

" Renown is something people have always wanted, but maybe what's modern is that it's considered a virtue, this desire, rather than a vice. I might be wrong about this. "

" People don't know who I am from my clothes, and they don't need to. "

" I don't think about the reader when I'm writing, but I do when I'm editing, of course. For instance, I self-consciously didn't want to do anything to increase the divide between mothers and nonmothers - I think that divide is so horrible and destructive and unnecessary. "

" Just because you are alive does not mean you have to give life. "

" I don't really have a schedule; I just get up in the morning. I work at home. I don't feel that my work is a separate thing from living - I get ideas about what I want to write about from the real things that I'm worrying about as I live. "

" I think that so many people who have children seem to want other people to have children in order to make their choice feel more essential, more inevitable, and just more right. "

" I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing. "

" In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home. "

" 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. "

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

Sheila Heti

Your

Representation

" 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. "

" As a journalist, you don't tend to interview people with a view to becoming their friend. You can't expect that. It's not professional. "

" Some of my favorite experiences of art are when I am there but my attention has wandered. I think stimulation is overrated, and persistent stimulation is exhausting. You sometimes have to be banal, tedious: make the rhythm go soft and slow, give the mind a rest. "

" I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division. "

" I've written about women's lives, and I just want to write about them from being a woman. I don't need feminism on top of that when I'm writing. "

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

" 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. "

Sheila Heti

Know

Story

" A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts. "

Sheila Heti

Vulnerable

Make

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

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

" 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. "

" The thing to do when you're feeling ambivalent is to wait. "

" Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. "

" 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. "

Sheila Heti

Successful

Group

" For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do. "

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

" I really enjoyed the process of 'Women in Clothes,' but there's no way I would have done that again. It felt more like being an editor than a writer, and I longed to write again. "