172 Quotes by Sheila Heti

When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.

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.

Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture.

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.

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 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.

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

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

Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy.