Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

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. "

" Renown is something people have always wanted, but maybe what's modern is that it's considered a virtue, this desire, rather than a vice. I might be wrong about this. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" An artist's love for what they create is what creates love. "

" Writing plays, I've always felt a little like I'm guessing - less sure of what's good and what's not good. I think that's because it's not a complete work of art. "

" There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" You think you're writing the most important book, you think you're writing the most stupid book, and you never really know before it's done that it's going to be done. "

" 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. "

" Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels. "

" Stand-up comedians have a very important relationship to Twitter. For them, it's a place to try out material. "

" Toronto is my home. It's where my family is. I think I feel an obligation to be within subway distance of the people who raised me. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" I don't really have a schedule; I just get up in the morning. I work at home. I don't feel that my work is a separate thing from living - I get ideas about what I want to write about from the real things that I'm worrying about as I live. "