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" I'd wish for my work to be remembered rather than myself. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" The people who don't read - who are they? How do they make sense of things? "

" There are people who live under the delusion that simply because they will it to be so, it will be so. "

" I always say to my students, 'If you can do anything other than writing and be happy, then you should.' "

" 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. "

" Because we moved so much, I was always having to adapt and work out the lay of the land. So I felt envious of those who did not have to try. "

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

" I was someone who believed that every day should be different from the last. "

" 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. "

" I wish I were a really good photographer. "

" We read to find life, in all its possibilities. "

" 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. "

" For those of us whose thoughts digress; for whom unexpected juxtapositions are exhilarating rather than tiresome; who aim, if always inadequately, to convey life's experience in some semblance of its complexity - for such writers, the semi-colon is invaluable. "

" For me, it was a formative experience reading Eliot when I was younger. 'The Waste Land,' in particular. "

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

" Things we write down are the fragments shored against our ruins. They outlast us, these scraps of words on paper. Like the detritus from the tsunami washing up on the other side of the ocean, writing is what can be salvaged. "

" You can't make a character do something they wouldn't do. "

" For many of us, we set out thinking there will be time in the future, and then suddenly we find ourselves at a moment when we have to acknowledge that the future isn't infinite. "

" If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. "

" Obama was the first president whose biography makes sense to me. He can walk into a room anywhere and find common ground with any person. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Women aren't supposed to want stuff. They're not supposed to have high emotions. "

" I digress a lot - it's how I experience the world. I would like to write in a way that will convey that to the reader, but also I need clarity. "

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

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

" When I am teaching, I first give out Tolstoy's 'Childhood,' his first published book. It is so transparent. It gives you exactly what it was like to be on a Russian estate in 1830. You are there. And that is the hope when you sit down and write still, I think - that you can transmit something of what life is like now. "