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" I'm not a writing group member, not a joiner in that way. I don't seek a wide swath of feedback. "

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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? "

" What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

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

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

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

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

" I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc. "

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

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

" Rushing around can be a pointless diversion from actually living your life. "

" 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 wanted to write a voice that for me, as a reader, had been missing from the chorus: the voice of an angry woman. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" You lose something in not being rooted, but you gain something by seeing the world differently. It's both a loss and a gift. "

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

" I went around in my teens and early 20s thinking that life was a con trick. I had managed to grow up believing in all sorts of romantic ideas about hard work and justice and truth, and it seemed the real world was much more complicated and shaded than I wanted to believe. "

" For me, the ages between 9 and 12 were great because it was before you wore any masks, and you had some autonomy in the world. You had some freedom, and you felt you had unlimited ambition. It's when you thought, 'I'm going to write plays. I'm going to be president. I'm going to do this; I'm going to do that.' And then it all falls apart. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "