Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Sheila Heti

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.

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.

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.

A daughter is more difficult than a rose.

I didn't wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration.

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.

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.

Sometimes you can't write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it's good for your self-esteem to work on something else.

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'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.

One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like.

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.

Raffi is arguably the world's most famous children's singer.

An artist's love for what they create is what creates love.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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'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.

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.

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 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.

My feminism is just part of my being - a part of my understanding of the world.

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.

Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!

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.

Women without children can help mothers, and we can just be all in this together.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The main problem I've always had with fashion media is that women are encouraged to copy other women.

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.

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

You don't go to tarot readers or psychics when everything's going well. It's always evidence of rock-bottom.

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.

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.

A line drawn with love can make us as vulnerable as what the line depicts.

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.

For me, a memoir is supposed to be understood as a representation of your life, whereas a novel is self-consciously symbolic.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.