Top 50 Sheila Heti Quotes

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.

There’s something about a woman’s life choices that invites commentary, whether it’s been invited or not.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Today, I defined ‘sentimental’ to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling.

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.

There’s something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children… What sort of trouble will she make?

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.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Every choice you make has higher stakes – or that’s how it feels.

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.

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.

No child, through her own will, can pull a mother out of her suffering, and as an adult, I have been very busy.

‘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.

The thing to do when you’re feeling ambivalent is to wait.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

To add something to the world should be the question, not not adding something to the world.

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.

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 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.

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.

Most fiction writers are driven to find their own ‘voice,’ but I am more interested in the voices of others.