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" Let's not confuse traditional behaviours with good manners. The definition of etiquette is gender neutral - it simply means we strive at all times to ensure a person in our company feels at ease. "

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" The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong. "

Lynn Coady

Heart

Process

Story

" It makes me proud not just to be a Canadian writer but to be a Canadian, to live in a country where we treat our writers like movie stars. "

Lynn Coady

Stars

Treat

" Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist. "

" I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing. "

" Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing. "

Lynn Coady

Over

Writing

" As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation. "

" I decided a long time ago to be myself and not worry too much about cultivating some kind of personality that didn't feel natural or true to who I am. "

" Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes. "

" True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways. "

" You can't really go into TV thinking, 'Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I'm only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.' I think you have to love what you're doing to do it well. "

" What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far. "

" Here's the thing about lingerie: The only time we see it outside our own bedrooms, it is on women who are gloriously freakish in their physical perfection. "

" The one thing I've always done as an author is talk to my publicists. Because they have all the best stories - and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They're not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them. "

" However long, it's definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness - that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness - always a surprise no matter how often it's happened - that their lives are very different from your own. "

" One day it hit me: Truest friends, God bless their hearts, could not care less. They love you, they're pleased you're getting married and, ultimately, they don't give a fig how you get it done. "

Lynn Coady

Day

Care

" When a man tells a woman there is no chance of a formal, committed, long-term relationship, the only self-respecting response is to take him at his word and move on. "

" Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity. "

" I even felt like I liked guys better than women - that men were relevant and women weren't. It took me a while to realize I'd been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender. "

Lynn Coady

Gender

Women

" No matter how committed a marriage, there will always be other people - those we have chemistry with and those we don't, those we are attracted to, and those who shop for functional outdoors wear. The sooner a couple can accept the existence of the former and exchange a few basic reassurances concerning them, the easier life gets. "

" Audience participation can often inject a dose of adrenalin into your average dial-tone literary reading, especially if a handful of audience-members are mentally unhinged, and let's face it - you can always depend on at least one crackpot at these things. "

" You know the actor's nightmare is getting up onstage and not being prepared? I think the writer's nightmare is giving a reading and somebody standing up and saying, 'That's not your story.' "

" Grownups, as a rule, should always be ready to pay for their own meals - or else ready to graciously accept their date's insistence on paying. The point is, one doesn't sit there batting one's eyelashes, fully expecting someone else to claim the bill. "

Lynn Coady

Someone

Sit

" We allow ourselves to unclench when we're home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy. "

" A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form. "

" The thing about relationships is, the stronger they get, the more rapidly the realm of romance starts to overlap with the domestic. "

Lynn Coady

Stronger

Relationships

" This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you're trying to tell. "

" There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by. "

" We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren't enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase - long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative. "

" I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches. "

" Anger is one of those emotions that doesn't follow the letter of the law. It speaks before it thinks. It rears up on its hind legs and charges. "