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" 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. "
Lynn Coady
Man
Move On
Relationship
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" Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity. "
Lynn Coady
Harmony
Relationships
Human
" There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable - this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange. "
Lynn Coady
Time
Focus
Friendship
" That's what fascinates me about these writers' retreats: You're in these small spaces with small groups of people, and all of the sudden, the spotlight is shining on you harder than it normally is. "
Lynn Coady
Small
Than
You
" I'm no atheist - I'm lazy. I really do like hassle-free Sunday mornings. I have a problem with organized religion, so I've simply opted out. Live and let live, I figure. "
Lynn Coady
Live
Problem
Religion
" A dominant misconception among believers is that their atheist brethren are a slavering pack of hell-bound debauchees, gleefully wining and wenching their way through life while loudly professing their amorality. "
Lynn Coady
Dominant
Through
Way
" 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
Me
" What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far. "
Lynn Coady
Energy
Will
Better
" 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. "
Lynn Coady
People
Outdoors
Marriage
" Atheism is a moral position - a rather rigid one, if you've ever read the opinions of its highest-profile espousers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. "
Lynn Coady
Opinions
Atheism
You
" It's the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, 'Should I go back to university and get a law degree?' I kind of looked around me and thought, 'What kind of idiot am I that I've just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I'm pretty much where I was when I was 28.' "
Lynn Coady
Writing
Law
Me
" I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance. "
Lynn Coady
Loved
Never
People
" 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. "
Lynn Coady
Kind
Time
Beautiful
" I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction. "
Lynn Coady
Me
World
Time
" Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative - readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next. "
Lynn Coady
Narrative
Long
Know
" Most don't live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas. "
Lynn Coady
Live
Inside
Writer
" The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it. "
Lynn Coady
Fundamentals
Conflict
Me
" We are all somebody's children, and when we're in pain, we regress, instinctively looking to our parents to make everything better. "
Lynn Coady
Parents
Better
Children
" 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
Me
" 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. "
Lynn Coady
People
Moment
Comfort
" No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness. "
Lynn Coady
Street
Own
Off
" The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed - products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees. "
Lynn Coady
Creative
Process
Us
" It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista. "
Lynn Coady
Been
Running
Windows
" The masterstroke of male fraternity, I believed, was the practice of never speaking of anything remotely personal or related to one's emotions. That way, no one is ever made uncomfortable. Any such awkward moments can always be dispelled with a flurry of pretend-punches. "
Lynn Coady
Fraternity
Practice
Moments
" 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. "
Lynn Coady
She
Her
Out
" I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms. "
Lynn Coady
Matter
Certainty
Me
" I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place. "
Lynn Coady
Short
Place
Doing
" Ever since 'Strange Heaven,' I haven't really reread my old work. Not so much because I don't like the writer I was, or because I find flaws in the writing, but more because I get so burnt out on a novel once I've finished writing, revising, editing and copy editing it that I genuinely never want to look at it again after it's gone to press. "
Lynn Coady
Heaven
Look
Work
" That's all small talk is - a quick way to connect on a human level - which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it's worth making the effort. "
Lynn Coady
Short
Small
Worth
" I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society. "
Lynn Coady
Just
Society
Always
" The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down. "
Lynn Coady
Down
Reading
Place