Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Sheila Heti

Stupid

You

Think

Related Quotes:

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Raffi Cavoukian was born in Cairo in 1948 and moved with his Armenian parents to Toronto when he was 10. "

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

" 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. "

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

Sheila Heti

Your

Representation

" 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. "

" Raffi is arguably the world's most famous children's singer. "

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

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

" 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 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. "

" I saw what was wonderful about human companionship. Before that, I was quite content to be alone, to be a solitary wandering person, and I thought I always would be. Love changed that. "

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

Sheila Heti

Years

Discouraged

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing. "

" 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. "

Sheila Heti

Know

Story

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances! "

" It's so weird how our existence hinges on just absolute crazy chance, but it feels so essential. It's like, 'Nothing would be here if you weren't here,' because you are the centre of your universe. "