Sheila Heti
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.Collection: Alone
I find that when I'm in a relationship, I'm just so 'in it,' you couldn't even call it an art; it's such embroilment. With a friendship, you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more.Collection: Friendship
Usually, you don't have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows.Collection: Friendship
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 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.
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 remember very vividly a little plaid dress on which my father sewed all these hanging beads, little horses and stuff. It was my favourite thing ever. I had it when I was four, and I kept it until I was 12, when I gave it to the little neighbour girl. For years, I regretted giving it to her, even though I had no use for it.
It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged.
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 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.
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.
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.
Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down.
Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.
People don't know who I am from my clothes, and they don't need to.
There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear.
In my experience, women who are taken seriously take themselves seriously. It's not what you wear.
I don't wear shoes that are going to give me any pain. I just cannot do that.
The thing to do when you're feeling ambivalent is to wait.
I wished to have the time to put together a world view, but there was never enough time, and also, those who had it seemed to have had it from a very young age; they didn't begin at forty.
There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make?
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.
I just always try to respond to what I'm most interested in at the moment - that hasn't changed.
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.
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.
Today, I defined 'sentimental' to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling.
No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy.
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.
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.
Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels.
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.
I really enjoyed the process of 'Women in Clothes,' but there's no way I would have done that again. It felt more like being an editor than a writer, and I longed to write again.
I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling.
Stand-up comedians have a very important relationship to Twitter. For them, it's a place to try out material.
You don't go to tarot readers or psychics when everything's going well. It's always evidence of rock-bottom.
I didn't wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration.
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.
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.
Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape.
'The Chairs are Where the People Go' was told to me by my friend Misha Glouberman; I typed as he talked. In 'How Should a Person Be?' the transcribed dialogues between me and my friends help form the structure of the book.
For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.
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 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.
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.
Writing, for me, when I'm writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I'm writing, the character or self I'm writing about and my whole self - when I began the book - become entwined. It's soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I'm trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts.
Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head... it's really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it's cheating.
Everyone's always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not.
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.
Sometimes you can't write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it's good for your self-esteem to work on something else.