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" Laurie Simmons began showing her photographs in New York in the late '70s: black-and-white and then candy-colored scenarios with plastic dolls in 1950s-style domestic interiors. "

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" I think making friends you can work with is a skill like any other, developing those particular kinds of intimacies. They're intimacies like any other, but they grow in a definite direction, not just willy-nilly like normal friendships. "

Sheila Heti

Direction

You

Work

" 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. "

Sheila Heti

Know

Story

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

" I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my mid-twenties. "

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

Sheila Heti

Your

Representation

" It's so weird how our existence hinges on just absolute crazy chance, but it feels so essential. It's like, 'Nothing would be here if you weren't here,' because you are the centre of your universe. "

" When I was younger, I think that I felt like I could only live one way, and I had to figure out which of those one ways it was going to be. I have no anxiety about making the wrong decision. "

" I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true. "

" For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do. "

" To add something to the world should be the question, not not adding something to the world. "

" To me, something that's beautiful in terms of a book is something that lives inside the reader both as a discrete and complete thing, but also something that seeps out into their life and thoughts. "

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

" Raffi is arguably the world's most famous children's singer. "

" Raffi doesn't have any grand theories about why his music has been so successful, but he credits a group called the Babysitters as early inspiration. "

Sheila Heti

Successful

Group

" Some of my favorite experiences of art are when I am there but my attention has wandered. I think stimulation is overrated, and persistent stimulation is exhausting. You sometimes have to be banal, tedious: make the rhythm go soft and slow, give the mind a rest. "

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

" A daughter is more difficult than a rose. "

Sheila Heti

Than

Difficult

" Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture. "

" Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down. "

" The main problem I've always had with fashion media is that women are encouraged to copy other women. "

" One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. "

" Stand-up comedians have a very important relationship to Twitter. For them, it's a place to try out material. "

" You don't go to tarot readers or psychics when everything's going well. It's always evidence of rock-bottom. "

Sheila Heti

Always

You

" I don't think 'Motherhood' is a map for women. I would never say that it's a template for every woman in response to her biology. "

" 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. "

" As a journalist, you don't tend to interview people with a view to becoming their friend. You can't expect that. It's not professional. "

" Women, post-menopause, go back to how they were before they started menstruating, and there's this great freedom in a woman's life when she reaches the end of that reproductive cycle, and that most women come into their own strength, the same strength they had as a girl. "

" There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the supposed life cycle. "

" 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. "

" 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. "