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

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" 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. "

" If you want to write from life, you can't really write a story. People are always changing, and I think if we didn't look the same day-to-day, and our self weren't always in our body, would we even be the same? The continuity is in our bodies. "

" 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. "

" Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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've written about women's lives, and I just want to write about them from being a woman. I don't need feminism on top of that when I'm writing. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters. "

" In my experience, women who are taken seriously take themselves seriously. It's not what you wear. "

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

" 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. "

" Growing up, I never knew that Raffi turned down celebrity endorsements, TV shows, and specials and refused to make merchandise, but it makes sense given how I think about him: My memories are limited to his voice through the record player and the album covers I stared at. "

" Today, I defined 'sentimental' to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling. "

" I feel like every single time I've published a book, there's some little light in me that goes out. I've seen the way people can misunderstand or misinterpret things, if not maliciously, then without a lot of sensitivity. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape. "

" I don't think about the reader when I'm writing, but I do when I'm editing, of course. For instance, I self-consciously didn't want to do anything to increase the divide between mothers and nonmothers - I think that divide is so horrible and destructive and unnecessary. "