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

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" Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others. "

" Toronto is my home. It's where my family is. I think I feel an obligation to be within subway distance of the people who raised me. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Writing makes everything else in my life okay; it makes everything make sense. "

" Sometimes you can't write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it's good for your self-esteem to work on something else. "

" I saw what was wonderful about human companionship. Before that, I was quite content to be alone, to be a solitary wandering person, and I thought I always would be. Love changed that. "

" Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen. "

" The reason I write is because I have questions. What I don't want is for people to forget that I'm a novelist and think I'm a sociologist or something. I don't want to feel trapped into a corner where I don't belong. "

" Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels. "

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

" Women without children can help mothers, and we can just be all in this together. "

" There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear. "

" You think you're writing the most important book, you think you're writing the most stupid book, and you never really know before it's done that it's going to be done. "

" There's something about a woman's life choices that invites commentary, whether it's been invited or not. "

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

" No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy. "

" Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances! "

" I think that part of the reason I like collaboration so much is because it's something unexpected coming in, and you have to stretch yourself to absorb it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Non-mothers do, too. "

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

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

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

" I don't wear shoes that are going to give me any pain. I just cannot do that. "

" Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not. "