Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Black-And-White

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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'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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make? "

" 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. "