A Quote by Sheila Heti

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.
Why do I write about China? That is a very good question. I think there are questions about China that I haven't been able to answer. The reason I write is that there are questions to which I want to find answers - or I want to find questions beyond those questions.
I'm not in show business because I don't have to go to the meetings, I'm just not a part of it, I don't belong to it. When you "belong" to something. You want to think about that word, "belong." People should think about that: it means they own you. If you belong to something it owns you, and I just don't care for that. I like spinning out here like one of those subatomic particles that they can't quite pin down.
While we [people] keep putting a face on HIV and AIDS, I think what we forget is that there are human beings, just people with emotions and feelings, women who want to be loved, men who want to be loved, who want to feel something.
People seem to forget what it was like to be a child. I think it's partly because they want to forget, because it usually wasn't as good as you thought it was, and so you want to skip over those things, and not have to relate to that anymore.
One's politics are part of one even when one is writing. But if I want to say anything about the state of civil society, I will write an essay. The responsibilities you feel as a novelist are literary ones, I think, not civic ones. And I think politicians are interesting to write about.
Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.
I write in spurts. I write when I have to because the pressure builds up and I feel enough confidence that something has matured in my head and I can write it down. But once something is really under way, I don't want to do anything else. I don't go out, much of the time I forget to eat, I sleep very little. It's a very undisciplined way of working and makes me not very prolific. But I'm too interested in many other things.
It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.
No matter what decision I make, I want people to know that there's a reason I made it, and it's because it was something I felt like needed to happen. I don't want people to think that I've just gone crazy.
I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something.
I don't belong to anything anymore and I want to feel like I belong to something.
Peope, especially unhappy people, want a cause. They want something to belong to, to be a part of something great and bigger, and to be led. It's easy to be a cog in a machine: you don't have to think, you have no responsibility. You're just following orders, doing as you're told.
I want people to feel inspired. I want people to feel good. I want people to feel something. I want people to strive for what they want in their life, and I want them to heal from anything that's hurting them.
You want people to feel like they belong to something. And not be elitist. You don't want us to be elitist.
I think it comes in cycles for Brandy [Burre] and for many women. You want to take care of your home, making it as good as possible for your kids and for yourself, and then eventually you feel trapped and you want to break out of that. You want to be someone else and you want the world to look at you as something else. Eventually, you come back again. The cycles are very much a part of her life.
I write songs that mean something to me because I want to connect with people and make them feel something too.
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