Sheila Heti
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 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.
Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!
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.
Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions.
Women without children can help mothers, and we can just be all in this together.
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.
If you want to write from life, you can't really write a story. People are always changing, and I think if we didn't look the same day-to-day, and our self weren't always in our body, would we even be the same? The continuity is in our bodies.
When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.
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.
I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way. I feel like there's this great fullness to being alone, and writing is a really vivid way and a really magical way of being alone.
Writing makes everything else in my life okay; it makes everything make sense.
Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy.
A daughter is more difficult than a rose.
In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home.
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'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.
My feminism is just part of my being - a part of my understanding of the world.
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.
The main problem I've always had with fashion media is that women are encouraged to copy other women.
One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like.
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.
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.
Raffi is arguably the world's most famous children's singer.
Raffi Cavoukian was born in Cairo in 1948 and moved with his Armenian parents to Toronto when he was 10.
Raffi doesn't have any grand theories about why his music has been so successful, but he credits a group called the Babysitters as early inspiration.
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.
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.
I'd rather that people could be both entertained and given rest while reading my book than for someone to have to put the book down to take a rest. You can't just be lighting firecrackers all the time.
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.
I think that so many people who have children seem to want other people to have children in order to make their choice feel more essential, more inevitable, and just more right.
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.
To add something to the world should be the question, not not adding something to the world.
There's something about a woman's life choices that invites commentary, whether it's been invited or not.
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 feel like every single time I've published a book, there's some little light in me that goes out. I've seen the way people can misunderstand or misinterpret things, if not maliciously, then without a lot of sensitivity.
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.
An artist's love for what they create is what creates love.
Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen.
A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts.
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.
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.
One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me.Collection: Women
We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.Collection: Men
I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.Collection: Thinking
We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.Collection: Effects
Literature and art are one of a number of relationships I have with the world. Like you have relationships with your friends and a relationship with your lover and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your work - sometimes it's really great; sometimes it's non-existent, sometimes it's fruitful.Collection: Art
It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.Collection: Long
You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.Collection: Knows