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.”

“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.”

“I just always try to respond to what I'm most interested in at the moment - that hasn't changed.”

“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.”

“We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.”

“'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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“You don't go to tarot readers or psychics when everything's going well. It's always evidence of rock-bottom.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Today, I defined 'sentimental' to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling.”

“A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts.”

“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.”

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