Quotes from Lynn Coady

It makes me proud not just to be a Canadian writer but to be a Canadian, to live in a country where we treat our writers like movie stars.

The masterstroke of male fraternity, I believed, was the practice of never speaking of anything remotely personal or related to one's emotions. That way, no one is ever made uncomfortable. Any such awkward moments can always be dispelled with a flurry of pretend-punches.

True adulthood occurs the moment we grasp that the people who raised us do not exist solely for our comfort and reassurance. From that point on, the steady stream of unconditional love and support we've expected from them all our lives has to flow both ways.

I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.

The process of writing a story isn't about fair. It's about getting to the heart of your story, getting to the truth of it. It transcends ideals of fair and unfair, right and wrong.

You know the actor's nightmare is getting up onstage and not being prepared? I think the writer's nightmare is giving a reading and somebody standing up and saying, 'That's not your story.'

Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity.

I guess you could say I'm 'kind' to my past books in the way you might be kind to an old boyfriend you still quite like and bear no grudge against but with whom have absolutely no interest in getting back together.

I know what the Giller nominee effect is, but we'll see what the next level is.

No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness.

I really do think of it in moral terms. I think that we can't kid ourselves that the storytelling impulse is innocent and does nothing but bring good to the world.

When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.

I'm no atheist – I'm lazy. I really do like hassle-free Sunday mornings. I have a problem with organized religion, so I've simply opted out. Live and let live, I figure.

One does not become an atheist out of a desire for hassle-free Sunday mornings. People come to atheism because they have a problem with organized religion - usually a problem they consider to be of moral urgency.

There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable - this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange.

The thing about relationships is, the stronger they get, the more rapidly the realm of romance starts to overlap with the domestic.

Atheism is a moral position - a rather rigid one, if you've ever read the opinions of its highest-profile espousers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

The novel, as a genre, was once considered a diversion every bit as frivolous as Facebook, but over the years, we've managed to convince ourselves that reading fiction is as important to our mental digestion as fresh fruits and vegetables are to the processes that take place a little further down.

While Person A might believe the kitchen counter provides a reasonable surface on which to place one's balled-up sweatsocks post-gym, Person B - about to cut up some vegetables on that same counter, perhaps for a meal intended to be shared with Person A - can only read the sockball as a message that says, 'Hi! I have contempt for you!'

Keep a copy of 'Islands in the Stream' by Ernest Hemingway on the left hand side of your desk. Keep Fitzgerald's 'The Crack Up' on the right. When you get stuck, pick them up and pretend that they are having a fight, like you used to do with your GI Joes.

Somewhere in our cultural subconscious, we crave these figures that are big and strong and unassailable, like masculine fortresses. It's like how the 9/11 firemen were venerated.

A novelist's sense that he or she is 'above' a certain genre mainly comes out of the notion that the genre is somehow a debased version of his or her preferred form.

I've always been a sucker for any technology engineered primarily for the entertainment of the human race - even such technology as has been disguised as 'useful' or 'improving' when we all know the real virtue lies in its ability to distract and divert.

I," I'll type. And that will be enough. Then there are the other days, when nothing is enough. The poem grins. It grins because it knows it is a terrible poem. It grins in embarrassment. It grins in pity. It grins in superiority. I may be a terrible poem, it grins, but at least I have one comfort. At least I'm not a terrible poet. At least I'm not the guy who sat in front of a typewriter for two hours coming up with the likes of me.