Quotes from Sheila Heti

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

A daughter is more difficult than a rose.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

My parents are both scientists, and I was raised without god.

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

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.

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.

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

In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home.

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

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

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.

'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.

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.

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

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.