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" 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. "

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" I'll always find the hardest path. Needless to say, not always a good idea. "

" It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that. "

" As a reader, I have always enjoyed 'ranty' books, but they are all written by men. "

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

" If it's unseemly and possibly dangerous for a man to be angry, it's totally unacceptable for a woman to be angry. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I don't trust people who are likable. "

" I grew up on British fiction, and I write perhaps more directly out of that tradition. "

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

" I remember laughing so hard as a kid. "

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

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

" When you move around a lot, there are little bits of you from everywhere. I mean, my father's French, and I speak French, and there's a kind of struggle in me that says, 'I'd like to be French.' But I've never been fully part of that culture, that role. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" Women's anger is very scary to people, and to no one more than to other women, who think, 'My goodness, if I let the lid off, where would we be?' "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "