Quotes from Sheila Heti

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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