Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

Related Quotes:

" At the end of the day, what would be a Canadian sensibility? Is it Michael Ondaatje? Alice Munro? Is Margaret Atwood more Canadian than Neil Bissoondath? "

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

" Place and displacement have always been central for me. A type of insecurity goes with that: you are always following the cues, like learning the dance steps when the dance is already under way. "

" I'm a different person in French. I'm a different person in New York. I'm a different person in Canada. "

" 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. "

" I've never been very practical or realistic - I've always felt that if a project seems easy, or even attainable, why pursue it? "

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

" I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things. "

" The fictional narratives that television, film, and the news provide for girls and young women are appalling. "

" 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. "

" Especially since having children, a lot of the time if you ask me, 'Have you read that book?' the answer would be 'not personally.' "

" If people like something you've done - or don't like it - this shouldn't determine what you write or how you write it. Those are two separate things entirely: your work and the world's response to it. "

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

" If you know what you're doing, it's not interesting. It has to be a challenge; it has to seem impossible and urgent to do it. And then you do it. "

" The Strauss allowed me to be a writer. Without it, 'The Emperor's Children' would not exist. When I received the award, I was teaching, had one baby, and was pregnant with another. There was no time for writing. "

" The feeling I had several times in youth, when lying in a field staring up at the night sky, that I might fall into the infinite void - for people like me, this idea mostly provokes anxiety. "

" In the world I've lived in, gay marriage, for example, seems completely logical. And yet there are many people who don't live in that world. "

" If you're writing a thriller, and you don't make it compelling, then you've really not done your job. So it's easier for me not to set out with certain goals, and then I can't see them as unmet. It's like life generally: If I'm not aiming to be physically fit, then I'm not always thinking about being unfit. "

" I liked the idea of being from 'somewhere else.' I do think that's inherited. My father never had a fixed sense of where home was, and for my sister and me, it is much easier not to belong than to belong. "

" When I finish a book, I always fear that I'll never write again. It takes a lot of time. You always think if you could just do something else - but nothing else makes me as happy. "

" Don't go around asking the question, 'Is this character likeable?' and expect that to be compatible with serious literary endeavours. That's not what it's about. "

" Years ago, I worked in a newspaper office, and there were men that would have fits of temper, and it was just accepted that that's who they were, and everyone would laugh about it, but if a woman got upset or angry, something wasn't right: she was 'hysterical' or 'a little unhinged.' It didn't have the same sort of connotation at all. "

" In a globalised world, so many of us move around so much. You lose things, but you also gain things - or hope to gain them. "

" If you're rich, you can leave a library, a building, or a hospital wing. But writing leaves behind a visceral sense of what it was like to be alive on the planet in a particular time. Writing tells us what it meant for someone to be human. "

" My mother turned 40 in 1973. So in 1970 - when 'The Female Eunuch' came out and Ms. magazine was founded - my mom was 37 with two children, and she was just that little bit too old, and the circumstances of her life were set up in a certain way that for her to fulfill her ambitions and dreams, she would have had to break with the family. "

" In midlife, I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck. "

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

" 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. "

" If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be. "

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