Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Sheila Heti - Page 2

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.

People don't know who I am from my clothes, and they don't need to.

Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels.

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.

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

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

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.

It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged.

Usually, you don't have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows.

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.

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 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.

There's so much anxiety about being understood - and being understood through what you wear.

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.

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.

Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape.

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.

Everyone is their own kind of poet - you can't miss it when their words are written down.

'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 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.

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 just always try to respond to what I'm most interested in at the moment - that hasn't changed.

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 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.

Stand-up comedians have a very important relationship to Twitter. For them, it's a place to try out material.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Sometimes you do have people who are great at curating; sometimes you have people curating who don't know what they're do.

It's nice to go into your doom. It's so liberating.

I think a lot of people try to edit themselves out and I think that's a big mistake, because the person being interviewed is responding to a person, and if you don't know who that person is then you don't really know what's going on with the person being interviewed.

I do feel it. And I've felt it my whole life, that the supernatural has a role in the world.

Maybe that's good to not feel like you have to keep up when there's so much to keep up with right now. It's bottomless.

When I was in high school, and even to a degree while I was in university, I wasn't on the Internet. So it's not as embedded in my soul, that kind of way of being.

Then if he's sore with me, let him dump my ass. That will just give me more time to be a genius.

We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.

I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my midtwenties.

I kind of try to resist working a lot. I'm not a very disciplined worker.

I'm in a serious monogamous relationship, and I don't want to keep having different boyfriends, and I have this instead - with men and women. It's better. Instead of having sex, we have art.

He’s just another man who wants to teach me something.

I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you're writing, you're reading, you're talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you're writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations.

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

We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects that you hold dear. The others fade from your life entirely. You wanted them, but they did not want you in return.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

In the transcribing and the editing, you want some retention of how the person speaks - you don't want to edit out all of the hesitations and idiosyncrasies. And to get people to say something they've never said before. That's big.

I spend most of my time in my head. You can always work out solutions and satisfactions there. Maybe you can't actually bring them about, but there's usually a pleasant pillow of time between imagining you can, and realizing you cannot.

There was not an awareness of pop culture in the household. There was a lot of respect for working hard, and for intellectual and professional achievement.

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.

Somehow I had turned myself into the worst thing in the world: I was just another man who wanted to teach me something!

Literature and art are one of a number of relationships I have with the world. Like you have relationships with your friends and a relationship with your lover and your relationship with your family and your relationship with your work - sometimes it's really great; sometimes it's non-existent, sometimes it's fruitful.

You have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.

I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl who was as serious as I was.

To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life.

There's so much writing I could have done and so many ideas that I had and so many things I wanted to work on that I didn't. I like too much having things in my head rather than doing the work.