“Let’s not confuse traditional behaviours with good manners. The definition of etiquette is gender neutral – it simply means we strive at all times to ensure a person in our company feels at ease.”
“That’s all small talk is – a quick way to connect on a human level – which is why it is by no means as irrelevant as the people who are bad at it insist. In short, it’s worth making the effort.”
“Here’s the thing about lingerie: The only time we see it outside our own bedrooms, it is on women who are gloriously freakish in their physical perfection.”
“Flowers are an easy, eloquent expression of love at a time when words can seem clumsy and inadequate.”
“I’ve never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.”
“Now, as a writer, the whole world is your nail polish display, and what’s more, you can help yourself. A thrilling, colourful array of gorgeous human peculiarity revolves before your eyes, and you still can’t quite believe it’s all yours for the taking.”
“I spent so many years in terror of ‘making it legal’ because the expression rang all too true – the wedding ritual struck me as nothing but a flowery front for the fulfilment of countless, tedious contracts and obligations.”
“One day it hit me: Truest friends, God bless their hearts, could not care less. They love you, they’re pleased you’re getting married and, ultimately, they don’t give a fig how you get it done.”
“Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity.”
“One does not become an atheist out of a desire for hassle-free Sunday mornings. People come to atheism because they have a problem with organized religion – usually a problem they consider to be of moral urgency.”
“Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It’s like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated.”
“Loneliness sucks. It’s a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game.”
“You can’t really go into TV thinking, ‘Maybe I can make a few bucks doing this thing I’m only kind of interested in to support my one true love, which is prose fiction.’ I think you have to love what you’re doing to do it well.”
“I’m no atheist – I’m lazy. I really do like hassle-free Sunday mornings. I have a problem with organized religion, so I’ve simply opted out. Live and let live, I figure.”
“It’s the typical mid-life crisis kind of thing, where you just stop and wonder, ‘Should I go back to university and get a law degree?’ I kind of looked around me and thought, ‘What kind of idiot am I that I’ve just spent the last 10 years writing novels? Financially, I’m pretty much where I was when I was 28.’”
“As a novelist, you have to pick your battles. You are tired. You have begun to experience the first ominous tinglings of carpal tunnel syndrome. You wake up in the middle of the night with both hands lying across your chest like a couple of plucked bird carcasses, dead of all sensation.”
“A bunch of chairs lined up in front of a podium equals school.”
“Ever since ‘Strange Heaven,’ I haven’t really reread my old work. Not so much because I don’t like the writer I was, or because I find flaws in the writing, but more because I get so burnt out on a novel once I’ve finished writing, revising, editing and copy editing it that I genuinely never want to look at it again after it’s gone to press.”
“I should say I am not much of a gamer – anymore. The reason for this is that I have to make a living, and my body requires vitamin D, and I’ve come to value the heady pleasures of human interaction over the temporary exhilaration of reaching the ‘next level.’”
“No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness.”
“However long, it’s definitely the presence of other people that brings out the weirdness – that collision of your own way of being with the everyday lives of others, the abrupt awareness – always a surprise no matter how often it’s happened – that their lives are very different from your own.”
“I don’t even like to cry in private.”
“It makes me proud not just to be a Canadian writer but to be a Canadian, to live in a country where we treat our writers like movie stars.”
“I would just randomly blurt out things like, ‘What if a man showed up today and was carrying an umbrella, but it wasn’t raining?’ Eventually, people started to call me weird.”
“Most don’t live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas.”
“That’s what fascinates me about these writers’ retreats: You’re in these small spaces with small groups of people, and all of the sudden, the spotlight is shining on you harder than it normally is.”
“Something I’ve always written about is social expectations: that the eyes of the community are on you all the time, expecting you to line up with certain social norms, certain behaviours. Whenever you forgot about them, they’d be strongly reiterated to you, in no uncertain terms.”
“I’m trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there’s all that baggage: What’s beautiful about humans is what’s balanced by what’s kind of ugly and petty and depressing.”
“I really do think of it in moral terms. I think that we can’t kid ourselves that the storytelling impulse is innocent and does nothing but bring good to the world.”
“Guys know how to read each other’s signals. They know how to telegraph love for one another without throwing their arms around one another.”
“I would never have thought my collection of short stories would win the Giller.”
“I know what the Giller nominee effect is, but we’ll see what the next level is.”
“We are all somebody’s children, and when we’re in pain, we regress, instinctively looking to our parents to make everything better.”
“True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we’ve expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.”
“Anger is one of those emotions that doesn’t follow the letter of the law. It speaks before it thinks. It rears up on its hind legs and charges.”
“When you’re not sure your anger is justified, the thing to do is ask yourself exactly where it’s coming from.”
“We live in a society that celebrates familial connection above any other kind of relationship. We are shown photos of our great-grandparents and encouraged to marvel over facial similarities. We are told to take pride in our bloodlines, celebrate our ancestry.”
“It’s a moral absolute: If you are going to make a human being, you have a fundamental responsibility to that person – to honestly disclose exactly who they are and where they come from.”
“You can’t hint a man into bestowing the ideal gift that displays all the love, appreciation and understanding you feel is lacking the rest of year.”
“Atheism is a moral position – a rather rigid one, if you’ve ever read the opinions of its highest-profile espousers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.”
“A dominant misconception among believers is that their atheist brethren are a slavering pack of hell-bound debauchees, gleefully wining and wenching their way through life while loudly professing their amorality.”
“When a man tells a woman there is no chance of a formal, committed, long-term relationship, the only self-respecting response is to take him at his word and move on.”
“Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer’s dilemma, I’ll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist.”
“No matter how committed a marriage, there will always be other people – those we have chemistry with and those we don’t, those we are attracted to, and those who shop for functional outdoors wear. The sooner a couple can accept the existence of the former and exchange a few basic reassurances concerning them, the easier life gets.”
“In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework.”
“While Person A might believe the kitchen counter provides a reasonable surface on which to place one’s balled-up sweatsocks post-gym, Person B – about to cut up some vegetables on that same counter, perhaps for a meal intended to be shared with Person A – can only read the sockball as a message that says, ‘Hi! I have contempt for you!’”
“The thing about relationships is, the stronger they get, the more rapidly the realm of romance starts to overlap with the domestic.”
“You know the actor’s nightmare is getting up onstage and not being prepared? I think the writer’s nightmare is giving a reading and somebody standing up and saying, ‘That’s not your story.’”
“This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you’re trying to tell.”
“The process of writing a story isn’t about fair. It’s about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong.”
“Considerations of plot do a great deal of heavy lifting when it comes to long-form narrative – readers will overlook the most ham-fisted prose if only a writer can make them long to know what happens next.”
“Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it’s because they don’t have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.”
“Literary readings aren’t going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.”
“Audience participation can often inject a dose of adrenalin into your average dial-tone literary reading, especially if a handful of audience-members are mentally unhinged, and let’s face it – you can always depend on at least one crackpot at these things.”
“Do not make the writer stand behind a podium. Anything but. A podium reeks of the lecture hall. A music stand, on the other hand, is nicely minimal and lends the writer – who usually needs all the help s/he can get – a musician’s second-hand cool-factor.”
“I’ve always been a sucker for any technology engineered primarily for the entertainment of the human race – even such technology as has been disguised as ‘useful’ or ‘improving’ when we all know the real virtue lies in its ability to distract and divert.”
“The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we’ve managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.”
“Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight.”
“It’s kind of sad, the way we’ve turned the entertainment of reading into a kind of psychic broccoli – something to feel guilty about if you don’t force it on your face-making children while dutifully consuming a few token florets yourself.”
“A novelist’s sense that he or she is ‘above’ a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form.”
“The fundamentals for me are character and conflict. I put character first because readers will be indifferent to conflict if they are indifferent to the character who is experiencing it.”
“We like long-form narrative journalism, and we feel there aren’t enough high-profile outlets in Canada running the kind of stories we want to showcase – long, meaty, thoughtful, investigative.”
“We thought we’d name the magazine for the number of bridges within Edmonton’s city limits. We thought this number was 18. Much later, we learned that the number is actually 21. But we didn’t like the sound of that so much.”
“I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn’t very good at it. It wasn’t where I wanted to be ultimately.”
“I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job.”
“I think authors like me are always struggling with the idea that they should have a brand and a Facebook author page and they should get Twitter accounts. I don’t know what to do with them.”
“I decided a long time ago to be myself and not worry too much about cultivating some kind of personality that didn’t feel natural or true to who I am.”
“Keep a copy of ‘Islands in the Stream’ by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald’s ‘The Crack Up’ on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes.”
“It’s doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.”
“When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.”
“Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs.”
“I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.”
“My dad was a real man’s man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It’s a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy.”
“I even felt like I liked guys better than women – that men were relevant and women weren’t. It took me a while to realize I’d been socialized to have a slighting view of my own gender.”
“I still find the idea of a research-heavy or historical novel daunting. That’s something I’ve had in mind for a while: like, would you research for a year and then start writing? I sit down, and I just don’t know how to write it.”
“When writing sex scenes, there is often no pleasing anyone, except perhaps the writer herself.”
“I avoid writing about sex out of a certainty that no matter how grown up and matter-of-fact I might try to be, there is a snickering yet nun-terrorized 12-year-old-boy inside me who would at some point be certain to grab the reins in his hairy palms.”
“The creative process taps into our deepest subconscious, and we are each of us sex-crazed – products of a shame-based Judeo-Christian culture that has irrevocably warped us all to varying degrees.”
“What I’ve learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that ‘youthful energy’ will only get you so far.”
“There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.”
“I guess you could say I’m ‘kind’ to my past books in the way you might be kind to an old boyfriend you still quite like and bear no grudge against but with whom have absolutely no interest in getting back together.”
“I’m always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I’m doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they’re coming from a much deeper place.”
“You can catch a scent in the wind – an idea, or a concept – and follow it. You can delve into your subconscious and see what happens, in a way you just can’t when you’re writing a novel.”
“I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that’s going to be palatable to readers.”
“The one thing I’ve always done as an author is talk to my publicists. Because they have all the best stories – and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They’re not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them.”
“I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.”
“There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable – this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange.”
“The masterstroke of male fraternity, I believed, was the practice of never speaking of anything remotely personal or related to one’s emotions. That way, no one is ever made uncomfortable. Any such awkward moments can always be dispelled with a flurry of pretend-punches.”
“Sometimes I pine for the era of Miss Manners, when there were hard and fast rules dictating a well-bred individual’s behaviour in any given situation.”
“Formalized rules of manners were so great because they left no room for basic human haplessness. They allowed us to circumvent our natural boorish tendency to disregard the feelings of others.”
“We allow ourselves to unclench when we’re home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy.”
“You don’t need to have Asperger’s to feel bewildered in a culture that relies so heavily on inconsequential chit-chat to grease the wheels of day-to-day life.”
“I went into the world confident my tea training would open many doors. And I did particularly well with the Irish and fellow Nova Scotians over 60. But this only got me so far. It took a long time to cultivate the tricks of easy social interaction.”
“Dating, like almost every other male-female interaction in present-day society, is based on outmoded and unequal social roles and expectations.”
“Grownups, as a rule, should always be ready to pay for their own meals – or else ready to graciously accept their date’s insistence on paying. The point is, one doesn’t sit there batting one’s eyelashes, fully expecting someone else to claim the bill.”
“To buy dinner transmits that you feel time spent in your date’s company has been a pleasure and a privilege.”
Leave a Reply