“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.”
“Raffi Cavoukian was born in Cairo in 1948 and moved with his Armenian parents to Toronto when he was 10.”
“I believe there’s a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there’s the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.”
“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.”
“I don’t know what that line is between fiction and non-fiction that other people have in their minds, but to me, when I’m writing, it’s just like whatever the next sentence should be is the next sentence. It’s not this artificial division.”
“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.”
“A daughter is more difficult than a rose.”
“For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Renown is something people have always wanted, but maybe what’s modern is that it’s considered a virtue, this desire, rather than a vice. I might be wrong about this.”
“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.”
“I don’t think about the reader when I’m writing, but I do when I’m editing, of course. For instance, I self-consciously didn’t want to do anything to increase the divide between mothers and nonmothers – I think that divide is so horrible and destructive and unnecessary.”
“Writing, for me, when I’m writing in the first-person, is like a form of acting. So as I’m writing, the character or self I’m writing about and my whole self – when I began the book – become entwined. It’s soon hard to tell them apart. The voice I’m trying to explore directs my own perceptions and thoughts.”
“Everyone’s always telling themselves stories about their lives, writers or not.”
“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.”
“Sometimes you can’t write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it’s good for your self-esteem to work on something else.”
“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’ve always had individual friends, but I didn’t find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my mid-twenties.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I didn’t wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration.”
“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.”
“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.”
“You don’t go to tarot readers or psychics when everything’s going well. It’s always evidence of rock-bottom.”
“Raffi is arguably the world’s most famous children’s singer.”
“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 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“It took me five or six years to write ‘How Should a Person Be?’ and there were many times when I felt discouraged.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everyone is their own kind of poet – you can’t miss it when their words are written down.”
“Most fiction writers are driven to find their own ‘voice,’ but I am more interested in the voices of others.”
“’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.”
“People don’t know who I am from my clothes, and they don’t need to.”
“There’s so much anxiety about being understood – and being understood through what you wear.”
“In my experience, women who are taken seriously take themselves seriously. It’s not what you wear.”
“I don’t wear shoes that are going to give me any pain. I just cannot do that.”
“The thing to do when you’re feeling ambivalent is to wait.”
“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.”
“There’s something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children… What sort of trouble will she make?”
“Just because you are alive does not mean you have to give life.”
“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 just always try to respond to what I’m most interested in at the moment – that hasn’t changed.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Usually, you don’t have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows.”
“Today, I defined ‘sentimental’ to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling.”
“No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy.”
“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.”
“Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape.”
“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.”
“Every choice you make has higher stakes – or that’s how it feels.”
“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.”
“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 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.”
“Stand-up comedians have a very important relationship to Twitter. For them, it’s a place to try out material.”
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