Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I don't even like to cry in private.
A bunch of chairs lined up in front of a podium equals school.
I would never have thought my collection of short stories would win the Giller.
I know what the Giller nominee effect is, but we'll see what the next level is.
Most don't live inside their heads as a writer does, having conversations with her own ideas.
When writing sex scenes, there is often no pleasing anyone, except perhaps the writer herself.
It's doubtful that any fiction worth reading has been produced on a computer running Windows Vista.
Flowers are an easy, eloquent expression of love at a time when words can seem clumsy and inadequate.
To buy dinner transmits that you feel time spent in your date's company has been a pleasure and a privilege.
When you're not sure your anger is justified, the thing to do is ask yourself exactly where it's coming from.
I come from a working-class background, and I thought I had to be studying something that would get me a job.
I just have to trust that the story is going to shake out in such a way that's going to be palatable to readers.
No one expects the doormat to stand upright, shake itself off, and amble down the street to seek its own happiness.
What I've learned is that you get better at writing by writing, and that 'youthful energy' will only get you so far.
In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework.
Here it is, 2011, and I feel zero shame when I tell you I would like to marry my smartphone. It is a handful of pure delight.
I started out in the journalism program, but I got kicked out. I wasn't very good at it. It wasn't where I wanted to be ultimately.
We are all somebody's children, and when we're in pain, we regress, instinctively looking to our parents to make everything better.
The thing about relationships is, the stronger they get, the more rapidly the realm of romance starts to overlap with the domestic.
We allow ourselves to unclench when we're home with our families, which is one of the truly wonderful advantages of human intimacy.
Delightful, tragic, gloriously elegiac and riddled with puns-Close to Hugh is just like life, only so much more beautiful for being art.
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.
Loneliness sucks. It's a slog. It feels wonderful and exhilarating when someone makes it go away. But love is a whole different ball game.
I think, as writers, our first responsibility is to writing an honest story. Tell the story you want to tell, without pulling your punches.
Guys know how to read each other's signals. They know how to telegraph love for one another without throwing their arms around one another.
I've never understood people who treat their loved ones worse and with less respect than they would a total stranger or minor acquaintance.
Filtering can be a very good thing when it comes to human relationships and familial harmony. Yeah, filtering is often an absolute necessity.
Anger is one of those emotions that doesn't follow the letter of the law. It speaks before it thinks. It rears up on its hind legs and charges.
Dating, like almost every other male-female interaction in present-day society, is based on outmoded and unequal social roles and expectations.
You can't hint a man into bestowing the ideal gift that displays all the love, appreciation and understanding you feel is lacking the rest of year.
Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.
I decided a long time ago to be myself and not worry too much about cultivating some kind of personality that didn't feel natural or true to who I am.
Sometimes I pine for the era of Miss Manners, when there were hard and fast rules dictating a well-bred individual's behaviour in any given situation.
Never use dogs to symbolize anything. That is ridiculous. Always ensure that any dogs are just dogs; i.e., characters in the story who happen to be dogs.
Here's the thing about lingerie: The only time we see it outside our own bedrooms, it is on women who are gloriously freakish in their physical perfection.
You don't need to have Asperger's to feel bewildered in a culture that relies so heavily on inconsequential chit-chat to grease the wheels of day-to-day life.
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.
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.
I was always watching the boys and how they interacted. It comes with being a feminist, just somebody who thinks a lot about gender and how it plays out in society.
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.
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.
When a man tells a woman there is no chance of a formal, committed, long-term relationship, the only self-respecting response is to take him at his word and move on.
I'm always writing across the same themes. But with short stories, I'm doing something different than with novels. In some ways, they're coming from a much deeper place.
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.
I would just randomly blurt out things like, 'What if a man showed up today and was carrying an umbrella, but it wasn't raining?' Eventually, people started to call me weird.
My dad was a real man's man, and so were my brothers, in a small town where hockey is king. It's a masculine culture. It made me really attentive to what it meant to be a guy.
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.
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.
This is not necessarily the answer people want, but ultimately, I think writing is an amoral process. Your ultimate responsibility is to the truth of the story you're trying to tell.
Literary readings aren't going to shake their reputation as the added-fibre of our entertainment diet until the people who organize and participate in them snap out of this mentality.