Stand-up comedians have a very important relationship to Twitter. For them, it's a place to try out material.
— Sheila Heti
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.
Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape.
Today, I defined 'sentimental' to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling.
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.
Just because you are alive does not mean you have to give life.
The thing to do when you're feeling ambivalent is to wait.
There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear.
Most fiction writers are driven to find their own 'voice,' but I am more interested in the voices of others.
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.
It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To add something to the world should be the question, not not adding something to the world.
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 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.
Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels.
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.
Usually, you don't have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows.
I just always try to respond to what I'm most interested in at the moment - that hasn't changed.
There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make?
I don't wear shoes that are going to give me any pain. I just cannot do that.
People don't know who I am from my clothes, and they don't need to.
Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
An artist's love for what they create is what creates love.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy.
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.
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 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.
In my experience, women who are taken seriously take themselves seriously. It's not what you wear.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's something about a woman's life choices that invites commentary, whether it's been invited or not.
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.
