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

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" Only in our failures are we absolutely alone. Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free. Losers may be the avant garde of the modern age. "

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

" 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. "

" I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person. "

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

" 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 wanted to talk to a lot of women about their experiences along the path to motherhood - or along the path to not being a mother. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" We're so sure of what our unlived lives would have been like that we feel guilty for not living them - for not living up to our potential. "

" 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. "

" I don't know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I'm writing, it's just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It's not this artificial division. "

" I think I prefer writing books because the work of art begins and ends with you - it's easier to know if you're doing it right, as opposed to writing a play and then waiting around for somebody else to complete it. "

" I see friends of mine who have kids and continue to do their art. It's deeply impressive. I can't even fit an Amazon return into the day. It's been sitting on my desk for two weeks. "

" My feminism is just part of my being - a part of my understanding of the world. "

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

" I have this memory of being 15 years old, sitting with a friend on the steps of a little bookstore on Bloor Street in Toronto and saying, 'I'll never take money for my writing!' I had such idealism about this idea of trading your soul for money. "

" Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head... it's really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it's cheating. "

" 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. "

" It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged. "

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

" I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way. I feel like there's this great fullness to being alone, and writing is a really vivid way and a really magical way of being alone. "

" Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions. "

" 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. "

" There's so much to learn in writing and in life, and in any particular era in one's life, it seems like a few concerns have to be dealt with at once or else something really bad could happen. Writing seems like the place to deal with those concerns. "

" 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. "