Sheila Heti

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy.”

“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.”

“Writing makes everything else in my life okay; it makes everything make sense.”

“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.”

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

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