14 Quotes by Steven Heighton

The dreamtime of creative work is a turnstile to eternity. (from Workbok)

Let failure be your workshop. See it for what is is: the world walking you through a tough but necessary semester, free of tuition. (from Workbook)

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

To listen to critics, pro or con, and take their words to heart is to subcontract your self-esteem to strangers. (from Workbook)

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)

Cast a spell and the small flaws don't matter. (From Workbook)

Lyrical poets have to be in touch with visceral experience. I've always tried to avoid virtual experiences. That's emerging in my fiction.

It gets too easy to write from the point of view of a male character of my age, with the same cultural frame of reference.

I'm supportive of practical nationalism, like the kind we need in Canada to avoid being absorbed into a much larger country. The kind of nationalism I despise as destructive and infantile is really just tribalism writ large.